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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28042287">Butterflies at the End of the World</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/irhinoceri/pseuds/irhinoceri'>irhinoceri</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>We Few Against The Wind [4]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Origins</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Blood Magic (Dragon Age), Canon-Typical Violence, Chantry Bashing (Dragon Age), Dragon Age: Origins Quest - Broken Circle, Dragon Age: Origins Quest - The Arl of Redcliffe, F/F, Friends to Lovers, Grey Warden Joining, Loss of Parent(s), Mage (Dragon Age) Origin, Minor Cullen/Amell, Multiple Wardens (Dragon Age), POV Amell (Dragon Age), POV Surana (Dragon Age), minor jowan/lily</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-04-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-11 00:42:36</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>39,186</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28042287</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/irhinoceri/pseuds/irhinoceri</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Surana and Amell have spent half their lives confined to the Circle of Magi. Surana chafes at the imprisonment but Amell chooses to embrace the Chantry's teachings. Despite this, they are friends until Jowan forces them to make a hard decision that will change the course of their lives and threaten the foundations of their relationship. The end is just the beginning.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Female Amell/Female Surana (Dragon Age), Jowan &amp; Warden (Dragon Age)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>We Few Against The Wind [4]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2037403</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Prologue (Ostagar)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>"What the caterpillar calls the end of the world the master calls a butterfly."<br/><em>—Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah</em></p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>A whoosh of movement, the sound of wind, a harsh hard feeling on the back of her head.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Her vision went black. Yet embers danced in her mind’s eye, burning hot and quick with the intensity of souls rushing to leave the horrors of life behind.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She never felt the earth rise to meet her fall. She slipped easily into the fade.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The butterflies there were made of fire. They flocked to her, landing on her, tiny pinpricks of warmth on her skin, wings wisping a delicate crackling song, come away… come away…</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>I hope you have never had cause to doubt that you are special to us,</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Ma vhenan, today you are twelve. I will tell you a story my mother told me, a story of her grandmother, when she was twelve…</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>and that you are loved.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>They carried her away, in a cloud of amber light pulsing, swaying, soaring ever higher through the dark… singing, buzzing, thrumming with purpose, passing through the fade, on their way to oblivion…</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>I think of you every day.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Now when your great-grandmother was twelve she lived with the Dalish,</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>and tended to the flock of halla…</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>When she visited the fade in the safety of her cot within the Circle Tower she had dreamt of sunshine and cloudless days, endless grass, fields of lavender, and blue butterflies swarming in the air like ocean waves. They danced on the tips of her fingers, she the conductor, they the symphony.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>…</span>
  <em>
    <span>And after that she had no clan, so she ran with the halla all on her own, until she came near the borders of a human town…</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>I have thought of you every day for these past ten years.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>What did she know of symphonies? She had neer been to Val Royeaux to see an orchestra play. She had only read of them, seen the pictures in books sent from afar to reside in the Circle Tower library. The dark corners of the library were the only windows from the Circle Tower out into the world.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>I have told you all the stories I can think to tell.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>I believe that you are making your own stories, now.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>She knew what music was. As a child she had heard the songs of the city elves at night, had danced to them in the cool summer nights. Theirs were the sounds of earthy twangs from a few worn stringed instruments being plucked at in the alleyways, the breathy whistles of a clay flute that played three notes, the rhythmic patter and jingle of hand drums.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>You are ten, ma vhenan,</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Today you are fourteen,</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>You are nine, da’len,</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Eleven is a lucky year,</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>You are seventeen today.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>I was seventeen when I met your father,</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>when he arrived in a caravan from Denerim with five others…</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>She dreamt of orchestras the size of armies, symphonies that brought down the heavens in exalted marches upon the gods. She had dreamt of Val Royeaux and the opera house, of soaring swelling thunderous music. The Orlesian audiences hung from the rafters like bats, velvet robes folded around their shoulders like wings, glimmering red jewels of eyes peering from masks of silver, ivory, and gold.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The butterflies, blue and fire, invaded the auditorium and carried the instruments away, transporting them to Kinloch Hold, to serenade the mages in their sleep. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>We had a grand wedding day, six couples all wed that day, and there was laughing</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>and dancing</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>and singing</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>long into the night.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>You are no longer a child.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>You are nineteen.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>I wonder what people you have met,</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>what bonds you have formed.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>I know the Circle is not like the Alienage, that the mages do not marry</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>and have children.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>But I hope that you have found friends.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Mama Ghil'ana always </span>
  </em>
  <strike>
    <em>
      <span>says</span>
    </em>
  </strike>
  <em>
    <span> said</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>you were so good with the other children.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>I think you must have many friends.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>I have thought</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>I have thought of you</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>of you</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>I have thought of you every day</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>for the past ten years</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>every day</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The butterflies dispersed suddenly, violently, and she was free falling back towards the ground. A blinding light behind her eyelids exploded the world into heat and cold and dirt and screams and the copper tang of blood.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She opened her eyes and saw Solomae’s face aglow in the hot orange apocalypse of the battle torches. Her eyes were white hot, blood red, dark black.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You are </span>
  <em>
    <span>not</span>
  </em>
  <span> allowed to </span>
  <em>
    <span>die!”</span>
  </em>
  <span> she shouted, and her spit sprinkled onto Nelmirea’s face. The echo of healing magic lingered there, saliva tinged with the taste of elfroot and lyrium and prayers to Andraste, Mythal, the Maker, Fen’Harel, anyone who would listen…</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Nelmirea reached out a hand, and Solomae seized it, pulling her roughly to her feet.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“We have to get out of here,” she said, her voice hoarse, as if she had been screaming out an endless incantation. Her perfect, shiny black braided hair was in disarray, pearls slipping, dirt and darkspawn blood smudging her skin and slick wet tears painting patterns on her face.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>They ran, then, ran as fast as they could, ducking in and out behind cover, fleeing the battle. All was lost. The king was dead, reinforcements had fled, Duncan had fallen, the battle was lost.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Everything was a blur to Nelmiera. She held Solomae’s hand all the way, dragged along, tripping on her robes, stumbling dizzily through the night. The dwarves were there with them, the Wardens from Orzammar, with their hammer and knives. They ran together, Wardens against the wind, until they were lost in the dark cold Korcari Wilds.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She wanted to sleep, to slide away in lines of words written ten years past, carried by the swirl of insect ink back into the fade. Her eyes fluttered shut again and again and again but Solomae was always there, curiously feral, shifting between girl and ghoul, screaming, “you are not allowed to die,” whispering, “you can’t sleep now,” pleading, “you have to keep going.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Her hand was an insistent anchor to the world of the living.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. A Child of Eight (The Alienage / The Tower)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Nelmirea was eight years old when she was sent to the Circle Tower.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Before then she had lived in the Alienage of Highever. Her parents worked at Highever Castle, her mother a laundress and her father a stableman. But she had never stepped foot in those halls.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She remembered being raised alongside other elven children, by an aged woman they called Mama Ghil'ana, who looked after the young ones whose parents were absent for whatever reason. For many, their parents spent twelve or fifteen hours a day working in the households of Highever area nobles, like the Couslands, or other jobs, fishing the Waking Sea or working the docks. There were many orphaned elven children, too.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She remembered the hushed voices at night when Mama Ghil'ana confronted her parents, tired from their work at the castle, telling them about the odd behavior she had noticed in Nelmirea, whom she called Young Nelly.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“She had a whole flock of butterflies following her,” Mama Ghil'ana said, hissing as if she had found Nelmirea doing something bad, like throwing stones at a cat or pinching the younger children. “She waved her hands about and they followed her here and there, making the babies giggle. People talk. They’ll be coming soon. You can’t stop it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She remembered her mother taking her by the hand. Her mother’s hands were rough and reddened, smelling of lye and lavender. Her eyes were the color of lavender which grew in swathes upon the hills. Sometimes on her days off she would take Nelmirea out to gather herbs and flowers with her, ingredients that she would use to make soaps. Mother was always working, even when it felt like a picnic, when it felt like a special day to Nelmirea because she was not left behind with Mama Ghil'ana and the other children.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Those lavender eyes were watery and those rough hands were trembling, but Mother told her very seriously that she was to be sent away. The nice people from the Tower had been contacted by the Hahren, and soon she would have a new home. “You’re going to a magical place,” she said. “A castle on a lake filled with wonders and secrets and things I can’t even imagine. You will be with people like you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The only castle Nelmirea knew was Highever, where her parents went to work, and she asked her mother if she was to work there, to do their laundry.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No,” Mother said with a laugh. “No you won’t have to do laundry or anything like that. There’ll be servants who do </span>
  <em>
    <span>your</span>
  </em>
  <span> laundry. You’ll be a student, an apprentice, and one day you’ll be a mage; a very special person.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It all sounded impossibly wonderful. Nelmirea did not know what she had done to deserve such luck. Why should she get to go to a special school to learn wonderful things and be treated like a human princess with servants of her own, while the other children had to stay in the alienage?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She knew, vaguely, that Mama Ghil'ana had noticed her doing things she said were odd, like the butterflies, but to Nelmirea these weren’t odd. It was like doing a cartwheel, making a doll out of rags, or singing a funny little rhyming song while skipping rope. Something fun to do or something to entertain the children even younger than her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She and others around her age were now being tasked with taking care of the babies, those just beginning to crawl and walk and get into trouble, because Mama Ghil'ana couldn’t keep tabs on them all. It was hard to keep them all fed, and clean, and calm, and to stop them from throwing fits. When Nelmirea made soap bubbles dance, summoned sparklers in the air, or made the butterflies flock in formation, the babies were not bored. Their small mouths fell open, slack with wonder, and their eye grew wide. They laughed and clapped and said, “More, Nelly, more!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She remembered the day the templars came. They were tall and frightening, clad all in plate mail and helmets with masks. They were human, when for some reason Nelmirea had imagined they would be elves. Humans couldn’t come into the Alienage without first getting permission from the human guards who stood outside the gates, just like elves had to have reasons for traveling in and out of the alienage for work or travel. The templars came to their house. Mother and Father had not gone to work that day, and Nelmirea had heard them speaking vaguely of how Lady Cousland had been very sympathetic and how lucky they were to have leave to see her off.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She remembered not wanting to go away with the templars, because they were so tall and impenetrable in their armor, and because they had looked at her with beady glimmering eyes through the slits of their visors and asked, “Is this the child?” like one might ask, “Is this the feral dog?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Still, Mother had held her hand and guided her out to hand her over to her new guardians. She had packed Nelmirea a small satchel of things, tokens of home and some snacks for the journey, and the weight of it was comforting against her back. Father knelt down and told her, as he had told her many times, to be good and polite and calm and not to do anything to make the humans mad.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She remembered the long trip to Kinloch Hold. It was only a couple days ride from Highever, but it felt like a lifetime, because she was all alone with the strange, imposing humans. The templars. They rarely spoke to her, except to give her orders, but they constantly had their eyes on her. Watching her. Appraising her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She heeded her father’s words. She was too terrified to do anything else. The templars rifled through her satchel, inspecting it. They didn’t take anything, but when they gave it back it felt tainted. They’d had their grasping human hands all over the things her mother had packed, the shabby treasures she had carefully wrapped in handkerchiefs, along with the letters Nelmirea could not yet read.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She had been lagging behind in her studies. Mama Ghil'ana had been so busy she’d not been keeping on the older children to learn their letters and numbers, leaving them more and more to their own devices. With the babies to care for and other distractions to keep them occupied, learning to read had not seemed so very important.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You’ll be taught to read and write at the Tower,” her Mother had assured her, “And then you’ll have these letters to read, and you can write back to me, and I’ll be so proud that you’ve been a good student.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea thought about running away from the templars and escaping into the woods. She could live in the woods like the Dalish, wild and free, and no one would bother her. There’d be no babies to look after and no clothes to wash, but then she’d never learn to read and she wouldn’t ever know what her mother's letters said. So she didn’t try to run away.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The Circle Tower rose out of the lake like a long, unnatural finger pointing an accusation at the sky. Nelmirea was cold and miserable in the rowboat, seated between the two templars, and she shivered as the spire of her new home rose out of the mists before them. Inside there were more humans, many templars, but also the mages her mother had told her about. Very special people, dressed in robes, looking solemn and averting their eyes as the templars led her past.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She was put with a group of children, other young initiates newly arrived at the Circle. They were all human. Her mother had said there would be people like her at the Tower, but she didn’t see any.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea hated it at the Circle. It was dark and dank and cold, no sunlight reaching through the windows into the lower circles where the children were kept. The chill of the lake was omnipresent, and to Nelmirea it seemed that the stone walls were always a little bit damp, a little moldy, a little cold.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The templars were always there, cold and watchful, hiding behind their armor and helmets.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The other children cried a great deal, screaming for their mothers, begging to go home. The longer they were there the quieter they got, giving in to acceptance or despair, but then there would always be new arrivals fresh with the smell of the outside world and the tenacious desire to be free.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It seemed that not all children were prepared for their journey to the tower. Not all parents took them aside and told them they were being sent away, then waited patiently for the templars to come. Some parents lived in denial about their children’s future, tried to hide them, or just ignore the problem until the templars were called on by some concerned neighbor, teacher, or family friend. Sometimes the templars had to rip children away from crying mothers, and those children arrived at the Tower in fits of anger, fear, or deep withdrawn sadness.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea kept her head down and tried not to show anyone how she felt. She had learned this in the alienage as an elf and it served her well as a mage in the tower. Just as she concealed herself from the human guards or intruders into the alienage, she shielded herself from the notice of the templars as best she could. Even the other mages, her teachers or fellow students, gave her cause to hide herself, for they were most all human. There were some elven mages at the tower, but precious few, and none around her own age when she arrived at Kinloch Hold.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The first person she could call a friend was a human boy named Jowan. He had been there before her but he was not too far advanced in his learning. The teachers said he did not apply himself and so he had slipped behind his peers.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea did not do well in her magical training because she struggled to read the books they gave her. It was not that she could not read </span>
  <em>
    <span>at all,</span>
  </em>
  <span> but her ability was below what was expected of her. And she could not comprehend the spell books and ancient tomes her teachers assigned to further her understanding of her innate magical ability.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She could feel the weight of their judgement upon her. She was ashamed that she, the elf, could not read at the same level as the humans. She was giving her people a bad name, or making it worse, and it was not fair. It wasn’t her fault.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She’d been too busy helping Mama Ghil'ana take care of the younger children, she’d been too busy making butterflies dance for the babies, too busy picking lavender in the field with her mother. Too busy. Words got all jumbled up when she tried to make sense of them, like some evil wizard followed her around and cast spells on the pages to make the letters get up and dance around, taunting her with her inability.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She had her mothers letters, and when the other children made fun of her and called her “the dumb bunny” and asked her if all the elves in the alienage were illiterate, she wanted to brandish those letters to prove that her people could write. Her mother was educated. See? But she did not. She would never show these nasty children her most prized possessions. That would only invite further torment. They might burn the letters to mock her, using spells that she could not counter to light her mother’s words on fire, jeering as the fragile paper turned to ash. Even if they did nothing quite so mean as that, she did not want them reading her mother’s words when she could not.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jowan did not tease her. He didn’t call her dumb bunny, or rabbit, or knife-ear, or any other mean-spirited name for elves. He offered to help her learn the basics, to catch up to the others, because he knew what it was like to fall behind.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m not very good at magic, but I can read and write and all that stuff just fine,” he told her. “I could teach you, and when you get good at magic maybe you can help me get better. Fair?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was more than fair. It was kind.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He did help her. And she tried to help him, as best she could, for she did seem to have a more natural talent for magic than he did. Still, the two of them continued to lag behind the other children. The teachers had given up on them, mostly, writing Nelmirea off as the savage, dirty elf, and Jowan as a lazy, dim-witted boy. The less their tutors thought of them, the less well they did and the less the teachers were inclined to let them advance to higher levels of study.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“At this rate we’ll always be apprentices, never true mages,” Jowan would sigh. Nelmirea wasn’t as worried about that. Apprentice, mage, enchanter, senior enchanter, first enchanter, grand enchanter… these were all meaningless titles the mages made up to make themselves feel more important than they were. The truth was that every magic touched person in that tower was a prisoner of the templars, dogs leashed to the Chantry, monsters kept in cages.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea could see it all so clearly as she grew up within that tower.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She missed the alienage, and the wilderness outside the Highever city walls. She missed the open sky, the grass, the dirt. She missed plants that grew wild in the earth, not in rows inside planter boxes. She missed real sunlight, no spells conjured to mimic the natural light. She missed animals, birds, insects. She missed looking out windows and going out of doors.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Even if they did go outside, there was precious little ground surrounding the tower. It was all water for as far as the eye could see. Lake Calenhad was their true prison warden.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There were some mages who sought to escape the tower, but without official permission it was nearly impossible to leave. One apprentice jumped out a high window, diving into the lake, and swam to shore. They all thought he must have drowned himself until the templars brought him back. He’d made it onto land but hadn’t been able to hide for long.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Not everyone was such a good swimmer, though. And if a child couldn’t already swim before they arrived at the tower, not one was going to teach them.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Miss Noble Amell (The Tower)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Two years had passed since Nelmirea’s arrival at the Tower when she met Solomae Amell.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She was younger than Nelmirea and Jowan, but had proved so adept at magic that she joined their class almost as soon as she was brought to the Tower. The fact that a younger child new to the tower was already at their level and would likely soon surpass them made Jowan very irritable. He did not like the new girl at all.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea was unsure about her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She was a noble born child, that was patently obvious, but she was not mean or abrasive like some of the other children, who took out their frustrations on Nelmirea. They had been ripped from their homes and families and caged by the Circle, and clinging to their imagined sense of superiority over Nelmirea as humans over an elf was the only bit of power they had in the world. Solomae did not exhibit any of these tendencies. Still, as a noble the girl must have grown up being waited on hand and foot by elves, the way the Cousland children who lived at Highever castle did.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea had never liked the thought of them. Her mother spent all her days washing their linens and doublets and so had missed out on her own child’s life completely.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She wondered, sometimes, if her mother and father would have stayed home more, if they had known that they would lose her after eight years. Would they have worked less? Might they have found a job within the alienage, so they didn’t have to travel to the castle every day? Would they have still let Mama Ghil'ana raise her like an orphan among the other neglected alienage children?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She would never know.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She could now read well enough to open her mother’s letters, but they did not offer insight into that. Not yet.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Mother had written instructions on the outside of the pages, the blank side that was carefully folded over and sealed with wax. They said “Open This On Your Ninth Birthday” and so on, for ten years worth of birthdays, so that Nelmirea would have one letter a year to read.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She had already cracked open the seals on two of them by the time she met Solomae. Jowan had helped her read the first letter, her ninth birthday present, patiently waiting for her to give up on struggling over a word or a sentence before she asked him for help. But the other one she had read all on her own.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Her mother wrote to her from the echo of almost forgetting, reaching out to pierce the veil of monotony that was tower life. The pages of her letters smelled of lavender and smoke, so faint Nelmirea almost thought she imagined it, but on her ninth birthday she brought the paper to her nose and inhaled, shutting her eyes, and was back in the small home at the northern edge of the alienage again. There also came the faintest whiff of cheese and sausage from the food her mother had packed to go with her on that one-way journey to the tower. This scent had faded by the time she read the next letter.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae’s eyes were a bright blue like the wings of the little butterflies that drank from the flowers that grew in Mama Ghil'ana’s alienage garden. She was already quite tall, much taller than Nelmirea, though she was younger, but that was not so surprising. All the human children out-paced Nelmirea, their bones creaking as they sprouted faster and faster every day. But Solomae was also taller than Jowan, which just made him even grumpier around her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Her hair was darkest black and impossibly shiny, like the gleaming satin of the First Enchanter’s ceremonial robes, and it was twined into long braids that sat on either shoulder, just so.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea had to fight the urge to unwind her braids and run her fingers through her hair, combing it out and re-braiding it, making it into a crown or a waterfall. Solomae would have let her. But she didn’t want to be the elven servant girl doing her mistress’ hair.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She had never been a servant. But after coming to the tower she had heard that joke from the humans. Early on she had tried to make friends and had been sitting in a circle of girls, all braiding and combing each others’ hair, her fingers working deftly through the golden tresses of a girl who would disappear not to be seen again within the month. Another girl, who was not as nimble with her fingers and had made the red-headed girl whose hair she braided yelp in pain and complain of her clumsiness, looked over at Nelmirea and sneered.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Look at the little elf,” she’d said. “She’s so </span>
  <em>
    <span>good</span>
  </em>
  <span> at braiding hair. Is that what you did instead of learning to read, rabbit? Did you braid young mistress Cousland’s hair while your mother washed her dirty smallclothes?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A few girls had looked aghast at the bald meanness of her words, but some had tittered, and that acceptance of the bullying signaled the ground rules early on. Girls either taunted her outright, laughed along, or remained uncomfortably quiet, too afraid to speak out of turn to defend the knife-ear.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea had not braided anyone’s hair after that.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>When Solomae came to the tower she had little pearl tipped pins woven into her braids, small opalescent beads gleaming prettily in the dark satin. This was her prized possession, the only thing left of her privileged noble born life, just as Nelmeira only had her mother’s letters and a little wood carved halla statue to remind her of the alienage.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Another girl tried to steal the pins while Solomae slept, her hair unbound, but Nelmeira woke in the night to see the theft in progress.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She could see in the dark, and it unnerved the humans to think about her large pale grey eyes being fixed upon them as they scrabbled in shadow. Nelmirea jumped out of her cot and said, “What are you doing?” and the would-be-thief shrieked and dropped the pins. They scattered and bounced around on the floor, and that woke everyone up.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They got a scolding from the teenaged apprentice who was in charge of them, but thankfully no templars came. The one who stood guard outside their quarters just told the apprentice to deal with it and went back to dozing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea, Solomae, and the would-be-thief all got scolded for being out of bed, and the apprentice wouldn’t listen to any protestations about how it wasn’t Nelmirea or Solomae’s fault.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hush up or I’ll have you sent up to help the tranquil clean out the roosts!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They hushed up, though begrudgingly. Nelmirea would not have minded being sent to care for the messenger birds, but the tranquil gave her the creeps. They acted calm and collected on the outside, but she could never shake the feeling that somewhere hidden deep inside a mage was screaming.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They were not allowed light, but Nelmirea got down on her hands and knees and picked the glimmering pearls up off the floor. She wasn’t sure why she did it. Solomae had been nice to her but not so nice that she should be scrabbling around on the floor for her, picking pearls from the grit between stones. This introspection did not stop her from doing it, though.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She poured the handful of pins into Solomae’s cold, clammy palms, and whispered, “That’s all I could find.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Thank you,” came the whispered reply. Solomae was not looking at her, not directly. She stared at a point just over Nelmirea’s shoulder, her inadequate human pupils fully dilated but still unable to see what was right in front of her. “These belonged to my mother. They’re all I have left of her.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea said nothing, just folded Solomae’s fingers over her palm, over the little pile of salvaged hairpins, and nodded. She went back to her own bed and curled up like a cat, tight in on herself, and reached one small hand under her pillow to feel the familiar pile of letters, tied up with a frayed blue ribbon.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She kept it under her pillow or tucked into her mattress, though the halla she put out on her nightstand, as if daring anyone to take it. She had a little chest with a lock she could have stored these in, along with her stockings and smallclothes and extra set of robes. But that seemed too obvious. Too likely that someone looking to hurt her could magick the lock open and plunder her treasure.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>After the incident with the pins, she and Solomae were officially “friends.” Nelmirea combed out the beautiful soft satin of Solomae’s hair and set the pearls in a new crown of braids, smoothing out the flyaway tendrils around her face, and she ignored the bitter tittering in the background. “Look, Miss Noble Amell has a little elven servant to do her hair and guard her riches for her.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jowan still didn’t much care for Solomae, but he was not given a say in the matter of who else Nelmirea would be friends with, so he was forced to be nice, lest he be the one pushed away. For several years the three of them were a nigh inseparable trio, always seen together around the lower floors of the circle, except at night when Jowan had to stay in the boy’s bunkroom.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jowan and Nelmirea were perpetually disliked by their teachers, no matter who the teacher was or what particular subject they taught—enchantment, conjuration, herbalism, healing, et al.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae was just the opposite. She was so bright and eager to please that she quickly earned the reputation as a teacher's pet.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>As different as they were, it still made sense for them to stick together. Solomae was always trying to help Jowan the Ungifted and Nelmirea the Illiterate with their studies, and since the other children hated an overachiever, she had few other friends. That suited Nelmirea just fine, as she dreaded the day Solomae might realize that she was being held back by fraternizing with the elf and the boy no one else liked.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Five Children Gone (The Tower)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Every year on her birthday Nelmirea would crack open another letter.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She noticed that her mother altered her writing subtlety every year, using longer sentences, bigger words, and wrote to her of what she imagined might be occupying her thoughts as she grew from child to young woman.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea pictured her mother in the days before she was taken away to the Tower, finding spare moments in between work to sit and write a letter that would not be read for years to come. She wondered if the idea of a fifteen year old Nelmirea had been more real to her than the small eight year old child that still waited at home, innocently manipulating the world around her, not knowing it would cause her to be sent away.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She might have defied her mother’s wishes and read all the letters at once, as soon as she had mastered reading well enough to do so. By the time she was twelve she thought she was probably better lettered than her mother, and that was as it should be. It only made sense, as she was getting the best education in Ferelden despite her teachers’ lukewarm attitudes towards her. She spent her days studying magic, reading through the tower library, trying desperately to keep up with Solomae so that her friend wouldn’t be moved up to a level beyond her, wouldn’t be put through her Harrowing long before Nelmirea was selected, thus leaving her behind.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She did not read through the letters, however. It was her mother’s wish that she save them, the only yearly birthday gift her mother could give her from afar, and she wanted to savor those special days more than she wanted to devour the contents of the letters. In truth, they did not say much. Her mother, as much as she tried to anticipate the growing young woman her daughter would become, still could only guess at what might be relevant to say to her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She wrote about her own life, her parents’ lives, and told Nelmirea family stories.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She recounted her first impressions of Nelmirea’s father, who had traveled all the way from the Denerim alienage to marry her sight unseen. It was a custom among the city dwelling elves to arrange marriages for their children to elves from other alienages, in order to avoid intermarrying within the small local communities. They hired matchmakers to arrange such marriages, elves who freely traveled between cities, who kept family lineage records of all the elves in the Thedas. It was dangerous information if it ended up in the hands of the shems, so to be a matchmaker required the deepest sense of honor and responsibility.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She shared stories from Grandmother, and Great-Grandmother, who had been a Dalish elf living free in the forest until a calamity befell her clan and left her the sole survivor. Great-Grandmother had sought refuge in the alienage and been welcomed by the elves of Highever, but their family line was always just a little bit different, just a little bit more Dalish in the eyes of their neighbors. In her letters, Mother kept Nelmirea connected to the ways of their people, even as she grew up disconnected within the wall of the Chantry’s circle tower.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea remembered the Highever alienage’s vhenadahl tree and the names of the ancient elven gods. She said prayers to Selyse and Mythal as well as Andraste, though she kept these elven prayers to herself. Her mother wrote elvhen words and phrases into her letters, carefully explaining their meaning in common, so that Nelmirea would not forget what she had known as a child growing up at Mama Ghil'ana’s knee.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Mother must have thought she would have a more vibrant social life than she did, for in the letter for her thirteenth birthday she wrote explanations about sex and love and what Nelmirea should and shouldn’t do, how she should behave around boys and what she should not put up with or allow. The frank, detailed instructions for what to do when she </span>
  <em>
    <span>did</span>
  </em>
  <span> eventually have sex made Nelmirea blush wildly in the privacy of the corner where she had retreated to read her birthday letter.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She knew well enough even at thirteen that many young apprentices were carried away by their hormones and found all sorts of ways to circumvent the circle’s rules against fornication. But that was not a concern of Nelmirea’s. She would need one of those matchmakers who traveled between alieanges to expand their repertoire to include Circle Towers if she was ever to find someone she might be able to think about that way.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea had grown far too used to being suspicious of everyone around her to be able to imagine engaging in romantic liaisons with the other apprentices. She knew all the human mages in her age range far too well to want to sneak into storage closets with them, and the small number of other elven mages were all either too old or too young for her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Not that any of them were making any offers. She had developed a reputation for being anti-social and mean, and no one had ever accused her of being pretty.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae had been pretty the first day she arrived and she only grew more beautiful as time went on. She drew everyone’s attention, and even boys who had been cruel to her when they were younger tried to coax smiles and kisses from her. She kept them at arm’s length, though, not forgetting their unkindness of earlier years, and gained a reputation for being a prissy, too-good, stuck up bitch—a perfect compliment to mean Nelmirea the knife-ear.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>So while other teenaged apprentices were getting up to naughty things, engaging in illicit adventures despite the templar’s watchful eyes and the enchanters’ stern glances, Nelmirea, Jowan, and Solomae continued to innocently just be friends. If Jowan had a crush on either of them, he never showed it. As far as Nelmirea was concerned, he was like a brother to her, and not at all appealing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae’s reputation as a bitch was unfair, because she was the nicest person Nelmirea knew. But the judgement that she was too stuck up to be flirted with was true, in a way… for she </span>
  <em>
    <span>was</span>
  </em>
  <span> too good for everyone. Nelmirea thought so. She didn’t belong in the Circle Tower, locked away from the world, unseen and unloved. She should have been allowed to stay in Kirkwall, her home, and be the jewel of the Amell family.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Few people got to hear the full story of Solomae’s family. Everyone in the mage tower had a sob story about who they were and who their family was before their magic was discovered. It was all verses surrounding a similar refrain: the Sad Ballad of the Mage Child. Solomae was averse to dwelling on it or talking about it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She never spoke ill of the Circle or the Chantry. She said that she was glad to have a safe place in the world where she didn’t have to hide her identity. She chided Nelmirea whenever she made a dark joke or said a bitter thing in earnest about the templars who guarded them. “They safe-guard us,” she would say, “they watch over us,” whenever Nelmirea complained about being guarded and watched.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>When Solomae was very young her family had lived in a grand house in Hightown, the rich noble district of Kirkwall. Then her oldest brother, Daylen, had manifested his magic, and templars had come to take him away. Her mother lost her mind, abandoned the rest of her family, was never heard from again, and so her father had taken his four remaining children away from Kirkwall.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They went south to Ferelden and lived in Crestwood for a while, in a modest but comfortable house on good farmland. It was not so bad, she said, not at first. They went from nobles in Hightown to landed gentry in Crestwood, but they had not fallen into poverty or dissolution. The Fereldans never trusted them, though, knowing them as the strange Marcher widower and his odd children. Soon enough when Solomae’s older sister Elodie was careless and performed a spell in sight of the neighbors, the templars came again.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They inspected all the children, interrogating them and testing them for magic. Solomae’s father had instructed them all to hide their burgeoning magical talents, but when one child in a family developed magic it put suspicion on the rest. And since the Amells had proven that they would try to keep one child a secret, it was likely they would do it again.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Elodie tried to make up for her earlier slip by concealing her magic in front of the templars and insisting she did not know what the neighbor was talking about. They had imagined it, she said. The templars tried to trick her into casting a spell, tried to frighten her into defending herself, but to no avail. She retreated so far into herself that they could not even sense her magic, and began to wonder if it was nothing more than xenophobic suspicion that made the people of Crestwood send for them.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But then Solomae had disobeyed her father, and given up all, when it came her turn. She lied, at first, because Father had said to lie, had told her the answers to give. But her defenses were not so strong as Elodie’s. The templars had been stern, telling her that little girls who hid their magic would get devoured by demons in their sleep, and that Andraste wanted her to be honest with them. They told her that if she chose to become an apostate she could never reach the Maker’s side when she died, and her soul would be destroyed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>This frightened her terribly. Nelmirea could tell that it frightened her still; that she thought because she had obeyed her father and hid her magic, even for a short time, she was damned.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She broke down and told the templars the truth, that she could do magic, and so could Elodie. The two younger children hadn’t shown any magical talent yet, but they were still so young that it wasn’t a surprise. The templars told her she was a very good girl and that Andraste was pleased with her and would watch over her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Then they took her and her sister and both of her younger siblings away. Even though they hadn’t manifested magic yet, the templars decided that their father could not be trusted, not after he had actively hidden three magic touched children from the Chantry. If the youngest children never became mages, they would be trained to be templars. But all the Amell children were to be wards of the Chantry, regardless.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea thought it was a horrible story, showing the cruelty and entitlement of the templars, the Chantry, the whole Andrastan religion. But Solomae saw it a different way.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“My parents were wrong,” she said, quietly, when she told Nelmirea the full story for the first time. “I will never forget how my mother wailed and carried on after they took Daylen. And then she just disappeared. I sympathize with my father, the strain it put him under, I understand that he felt he could not stay in Kirkwall after the disgrace my mother caused. I can forgive him moving to Crestwood, trying to make a life there. But he was wrong to try to make us hide, to try to turn us into apostates. I wonder often what he was thinking.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Probably that he loved you and didn’t want you to be locked up in a tower,” Nelmirea said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae just smiled, her cheeks dimpling, and shook her head. “This is where we belong,” she insisted. “The Circles were built for us, specifically to keep us safe and allow us to thrive. Out in the world we’re seen as freaks, as monsters. In Kirkwall, Crestwood… we were looked at with suspicion and fear. I can only imagine what would have happened to us if there was no Circle. The villagers would have descended on our house with pitchforks and torches before long.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“How convenient that the Chantry stirs up fear in the people just so that they can ride in to save the day,” Nelmirea said, dryly.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She’d been an elf before she was a mage, and she knew those tricks all too well. The humans who guarded the alienage claimed to be protecting the elves from the humans outside, but they let humans in when it suited them, when some rich noble had enough coin to slip into their palms so they could go in and steal elven girls, making them disappear. And wasn’t it the Chantry who taught that elves were inferior, savage, heathen creatures who were too far from the Maker’s grace to be viewed as people? But Solomae didn’t understand this. She didn’t comprehend it, because she believed what the Chantry said about mages, what they said about her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I don’t want to fall prey to a demon in my dreams,” she said. “My Father couldn’t teach me how to defend against the spirits of the Fade. We were defenseless, like little nugs waiting for the wolves to find us. At least here at the Circle we learn how to control our fears and resist demons.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea was still a child and didn’t have any answers for what to do about demons. They scared her too. Solomae was always able to shut down her complaints about the Circle with dire warnings about demons, repeated as they were from what the Chantry taught them. It had been this way for hundreds of years, and Solomae said that if people hadn’t figured out a better way to stop mages from becoming abominations by now, they never would. It rankled Nelmirea to hear her say that, but she didn’t have any solutions, either. She was just a young girl who could barely read, at the end of every argument, and she felt stupid for thinking that she could solve a problem no mage before her had ever done.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>In the end, Solomae blamed her father for the trauma of the day the templars came and frightened her into disobeying him and giving up their family secrets. She did not know where her older sister had been taken, or if her younger siblings ever developed magic or were even now in training as templar initiates. She did not know what became of her father after he lost everything, wife and five children all taken away.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“He was selfish,” she said. “He couldn’t take care of us the way we need to be taken care of and he would never have been able to keep us safe or teach us what to do with our magic. I feel sorry for my father, losing all of us at the same time like that, but I don’t know what he thought would happen. That we would all suppress our magic forever? That we would get married and have children of our own and have to deal with hiding them from the Circle, too? Where would it end?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I don’t know,” said Nelmirea. “My parents never tried to hide me. As soon as Mama Ghil’ana noticed me doing magic, they sent for the templars. It was very fast. Barely two weeks before I was banished.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Don’t think of it as banishment. You cannot keep living in the past like that. We’re here now. We should focus on moving up, becoming the best mages we can be. I think I could be First Enchanter someday. Maybe Grand Enchanter if I work hard enough. You could get special dispensation to leave the tower, someday, to go serve out in the world. They let mages who are especially good and trustworthy take up positions outside the tower, so if that’s what you want you should focus all your energies on getting better, not being bitter.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I know you’re right,” Nelmirea said, because that’s what she wanted to hear, and it made her smile. Flash of dimples. Approving nod. “It’s just hard for me. None of it comes easy to me, not like you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’ll always help you, Nelly. Don’t ever hesitate to ask.”</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Dareth Shiral, Ma Vhenan (The Tower)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><span>On her nineteenth birthday, Nelmirea opened the last letter. Ten years in the Tower, ten letters from an ever more distant past.</span>

</p>
<p></p><div class="letter">
  <p>
    <em>
      <span>My most precious daughter,</span>
    </em>
  </p>
  <p>
    <em>
      <span>You are nineteen today.</span>
    </em>
  </p>
  <p>
    <em>
      <span>You are no longer a child. You haven’t been a child in some years, I know, but now you are truly a woman. I am sure that you have grown clever and beautiful and wise in so many ways beyond my imaginings.</span>
    </em>
  </p>
  <p>
    <em>
      <span>We are proud of you, your father and I. We knew when you were born that you would be something beyond us. Though we did not know you would have magic, we recognize now that this is the path that was always destined to lead you out of our lives and into what we believe is a life greater than your humble parents could ever give you. I believe in my deepest heart that as you come into your nineteenth year you will be on a path with the mages that will fulfil our hopes for you.</span>
    </em>
  </p>
  <p>
    <em>
      <span>I hope you have never had cause to doubt that you are special to us, and that you are loved. I think of you every day. I have thought of you every day for these past ten years.</span>
    </em>
  </p>
  <p>
    <em>
      <span>I have told you all the stories I can think to tell. I believe that you are making your own stories, now.</span>
    </em>
  </p>
  <p>
    <em>
      <span>Mythal watches over you, even if you cannot see the moon. Remember this always.</span>
    </em>
  </p>
  <p>
    <em>
      <span>Dareth shiral, ma vhenan.</span>
    </em>
  </p>
</div><p> </p><p>
  <span>Her mother’s letters always left her feeling sad. But this one in particular crumpled something up within her soul, and she turned her face towards the wall, hiding it from anyone who might pass by her alcove and see her cry.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was the last new words she would ever read from her mother. No new letters had ever reached the tower, and as a lowly apprentice she was not allowed to climb up to the rookery and send a raven out into the world herself. She had never really expected it, knowing as well as her mother must have, that she wouldn’t have access to a messenger bird to send to the tower. Apparently not even the Couslands, whom Mother had always spoken so highly of, deigned to allow their elven servant use of their birds. Or perhaps Mother never even asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea had noticed, many years ago, that her mother’s writing could be quite eloquent for a mere washerwoman. She had beautiful flowing handwriting, surprising for someone who worked so hard with her hands all day… those rough hands smelling of lavender and lye… and Nelmirea wondered if she had written these letters herself or dictated them.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She pictured her mother begging her employer, the great Teyrna Cousland, to pen these letters to her daughter. She thought of how her mother had said she was grateful the Couslands granted them an extra day off so they could be there when the templars came to collect her. How many favors would a noble do for their servants? How self-satisfied would they feel, doing those favors?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The first time these thoughts entered her mind she had felt ashamed. How could she doubt her mother had the ability to write a few simple letters? She had spent too many years with the humans, had begun to believe in the image of the poor, dirty, uneducated elves living in squalor that everyone around her accepted as fact though none of them had ever so much as set foot in an alienage or spoken to an elf who didn’t grow up in the tower with them.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Still, the thoughts persisted. She barely remembered her mother, except when she caught the scent of lavender, or watched the Tranquil servants peeling the sheets and blankets back from the beds on washday. She tried to remember ever seeing her mother writing anything, before. Tried to remember reading anything her mother had written. Tried to remember her helping Nelmirea as she struggled to learn her letters. She could not. She could only remember Mama Ghil'ana teaching her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Perhaps it did not matter. There were two options and they both made Nelmirea said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>One, that her mother was illiterate and needed someone else to dictate these letters to, and all these years it was the embellishments of a stranger that Nelmirea cherished so. Or, two, that her mother’s fine hand and eloquent words indicated a tragic waste of talent. She lived a life of drudgery, scrubbing soiled linens and burning her skin away with caustic liquids. And what was all that work for? To provide for a child that she no longer had, whom she had never gotten the chance to raise?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea wondered if her parents had other children after she left, babies to replace her, or if they feared ending up like the Amells… five children and all taken by the Chantry, in the end.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Finally, she reflected on the woman her mother thought she was, compared the one she was in reality. She was nineteen and still alive, a small feat in and of itself, but she did not know anything of this greatness her mother described. She was a mage apprentice of middling magical ability and no scholarly aptitude whatsoever.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae, born under the sign of Bellitanus, might be a great woman someday. She might rise up to First Enchanter and replace Irving someday, but Nelmirea had no such aspirations. She just hoped that she would pass her Harrowing when the time came.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae had already been through her Harrowing, though she was a year younger and had not been at the Circle as long. But that was hardly a surprise. Nelmirea had always known that she would become a true mage before her, though the sting of losing her to the upper levels had hurt well enough.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jowan was still an apprentice, but he had become distant and cagey as of late. He’d been spending less time with Solomae and Nelmirea for a while before Solomae’s Harrowing came and she ascended past them. It had been some months… perhaps even some years… since they could have been considered a trio of close friends and confidants.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea suspected that he had a lover, though she could not guess who it was, and he hadn’t dared to tell her. She didn’t blame him, for the templars cracked down hard on anyone who seemed to be forming strong attachments. A little hanky panky now and then was tolerated, but romance? True feelings of love and devotion? Mages were not allowed that. Too volatile. And if one was in love, one might dream of the privileges of the non-magical—family and children and acceptance. It wouldn’t do.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She was glad he had found someone to love, as dangerous as it might be, and she did not press him. It made her sad, though, and sadder still after Solomae left.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea had awoken in the night when the templars came to lead Solomae away for her Harrowing, and had lain awake all the rest of the night waiting for her return, dreading that she would disappear forever like so many others.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea always woke up when the templars came to collect a mage for their Harrowing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Sometimes, in the morning, the apprentice would return to get their things and say goodbye; an apprentice no longer! They would be excited and happy, looking forward to ascending to the nicer accommodations of the upper levels. Some said the Templars didn’t eye them with so much raw suspicion anymore, because they had proven themselves, shown they could resist being possessed by demons. Nelmirea wondered how long that lasted, as she had heard the templars murmuring to each other about enchanters and apprentices alike.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Sometimes, for too often, the apprentice didn’t return at all, or if they were seen again, they were Tranquil.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>After Solomae had been roused from her bed, Nelmirea had crept over to the empty mattress and reached under the pillow, drawing out a small pouch that held Solomae’s silver and pearl hairpins. If, Maker forbid, Solomae did not return, Nelmirea did not want these to be taken by someone else. She would never wear them, she could never wear them, but she would tuck them away with her wooden halla and her mother’s letters.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae had come back, and it had been a relief, but still, a bittersweet one. She handed back the pearls and hugged her friend, congratulating her and wishing her well.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You will still see me around, silly Nelly,” Solomae had said when she cried. “I’m just getting a different bed, that’s all. And it’s not as if you can’t climb the stairs to visit me.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I know, vhenan, I know,” said Nelmirea, wiping her tears away, but she felt as if a chasm was opening between them.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She had never told Solomae what “vhenan” truly meant in the elvhen tongue. She had said it meant “friend,” so that Solomae understood it somewhat, but had been too embarrassed even as a child to tell her that the literal translation was “heart.” </span>
  <em>
    <span>Ma vhenan,</span>
  </em>
  <span> my heart. Perhaps it was this inability to tell her that which made the rapidly growing chasm feel so inescapably deep and wide. Or perhaps it was the long held conviction that Solomae was so much better than her and would surpass her in skill, knowledge, and influence that created the distance and made her keep what small secrets she could to herself.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>After that all she could do was wait for her own Harrowing, at once dreading it and impatiently wishing she could hasten its arrival. She wasn’t as good a mage as Solomae—she did not trust so fully in the system the Chantry had devised to prevent mages from devolving into an army of abominations and destroying the world. She was the exact sort of anxious, irascible ne’er-do-well that the templars eyed with extra suspicion, doubting her fortitude and considering her a good candidate for Tranquility.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>No one wanted to lead a mage to their Harrowing if possession was a foregone conclusion, thus many times they bypassed the ritual completely and went straight to Tranquilizing the apprentice.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea would rather be killed outright.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>When her Harrowing came, it shocked her how easy it was to pass, in the end. She was tested not so much on her magical skills as her gullibility, her capacity for trust. And Nelmirea trusted no one. When the Pride demon, who had masqueraded as a mouse of a man, tempted her to allow possession, she did not even hesitate in her refusal. Indeed, she had suspected him of some trickery from the moment she encountered him, as he was so helpful and deferential that she could hardly believe it was not some trap.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And with that, she was a Mage of the Circle of Magi, Proven by the Harrowing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She wondered if this was the greatness her mother and father had seen for her. She did not feel great, she did not feel as if proving that she need not be slaughtered or mind-wiped was in any way “greatness.” It was survival. In her own way she was living as small and menial a life as that of a washerwoman or stable worker, and perhaps… she was even less than that. For her parents at least got to walk out into the world, they were able to travel from the castle to the alienage, a narrow path to be sure, but wider than the ones she walked every day. The work they did was rewarded with payment and they could love each other, could have children and raise a family, even if it meant hard work and long days, even if it meant giving their children to Mama Ghil'ana to look after while they were away.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>At least there were butterflies and lavender fields in the life her parents led.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She could not claim any special destiny which made leaving her parents worth it. But she hoped that they still might be happy that her magic had given her a comfortable life, so far. Nelmirea’s hands were soft, her clothes made of a high quality weave, and there were servants in the tower who cleaned up after her, who made her meals, mended her shoes, and emptied her privy pots into the lake. She was as spoiled as any noble human girl, in that way, and she knew how to read, and write, and do all her sums, and then some. She could mix potions and cast spells, though she did not recommend anyone drink her potions or stand close by while she was casting a spell.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae greeted her with enthusiastic joy when she emerged from her Harrowing, a success. “I made something for you,” she announced, “while I waited for them to call you to your Harrowing.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She opened up the trunk at the foot of her bed and pulled out a robe made of lavender dyed Highever weave, which was embroidered all over in a pattern of blue butterflies. They looked to be lifting up to the sky in a swirl that began at the hem of the skirt and blossomed out towards the neck and sleeves.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Do you like it?” Solomae asked. “It’s lined with samite because I know how chilly you always get.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I love it,” Nelmirea said, unable to hold back tears. She didn’t even want to hold back tears. “I love it so, so much </span>
  <em>
    <span>ma vhenan.</span>
  </em>
  <span> I can’t believe you made this for me.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Can’t you?” Solomae said with a smile. “Now put it on, I want to see if I sized it right. I’ll be so mad with myself if the shoulders are too wide.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>That had been a good day. One of the best. One of the last truly good ones for a long time.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Betrayal and Freedom (The Tower / The Road)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Nelmirea was aware that one of the templars had some grotesque mockery of a crush on Solomae. Templars watching mages with lust mingled in with their suspicion and horror was not uncommon, as were templars who took advantage of their power to force helpless mages into compromising situations.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She watched the templars with as much eagle-eyed suspicion as they watched her. She was careful to make herself unappealing to them as a woman, particularly because as an elven woman she was especially vulnerable to exploitation. Even as a child of eight she had known to be careful around human men, since Mama Ghil'ana, and Mother, and Father, and a host of others had all warned her of them and how they liked to prey on elven girls and women.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>This caution had served her well at the Tower.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She made a point to learn the name of the templar who watched Solomae with too much interest. Cullen. It would not do. She murmured obscure elvhen curses to herself at night, in the deep quiet while others slept, invoking his name, hoping some intangible malice affected him. There was nothing magical in those curses, unless one believed that there was something left of Arlathan’s glory and power in every elvhen word.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>While she was noticing him and learning his name so that she could curse him in her thoughts and under her breath, Solomae was noticing him and learning his name so that she could encourage him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea was horrified when Solomae asked her to surreptitiously slip him a note.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Absolutely note,” she said, her whisper a hiss and her eyes expressing all the disapproval she could muster. She pushed Solomae’s hand, and the note, away. Surreptitious note-passing was something to be done to flirt with other mages without the templars noticing, not to flirt </span>
  <em>
    <span>with</span>
  </em>
  <span> the templars. Fenedhis! Had Solomae lost all her sense?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She could refuse to be complicit in Solomae’s folly, but she could not stop her from carrying on a flirtation with the templar. Notes got passed back and forth by hands other than Nelmirea’s. There were smiles and glances and greetings in the hall which carried a note of yearning that turned Nelmirea’s stomach sour. She had spent years feeling protective over Solomae because she was beautiful and she trusted the templars to be honorable—a terrible combination. It was frustrating to see Solomae completely disregard all her concern and to be unable to do anything about it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Despite her worries, she could not go to one of the senior templars or Knight-Commander Greagoir to complain about Cullen’s misconduct. Because if she tried to get him in trouble, she would only get Solomae in trouble. They would accuse her of trying to seduce him, of corrupting a champion of Andraste and holy servant of the Chantry… as if she were not just an innocent and foolish young girl. Nelmirea had seen it happen before, to others.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>This all happened before Solomae’s Harrowing. Afterwards, Nelmirea saw less of her, and could not be sure if the flirtation was continuing. She hoped Solomae had cast it aside as a childish diversion better left to apprentices. She would not know, because Solomae did not confide in her about it after Nelmirea had expressed such strong disapproval.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But all that time she spent worrying over Solomae and Cullen and what improper lengths they might be going to in order to indulge in a secret forbidden tryst, she completely missed everything that Jowan was doing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She’d suspected he had a lover but never in a million years had she thought it would be Lily, the Chantry initiate. By Andraste’s flaming ass cheeks, what was the matter with them? Had they both gone completely mad?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She wondered if she had been dreaming her whole life up to that point. She wondered if everything that had happened since she came to the Tower was a feverish Fade nightmare and her friends, acquaintances, and enemies were all demons having a chuckle at her expense. Or maybe she was trapped in one long, endless Harrowing and didn’t know when it had begun or when it would end.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Once she came to terms with the fact that this was all likely quite real, she contemplated how she had allowed herself to be so blind to her friend’s weakness and foibles. Jowan had never been the smartest mage, that was certain, but he had been kind to her and almost single handedly helped her overcome her learning difficulties those first couple of years. Solomae had helped as well, but for the first two years, Jowan had been Nelmirea’s only friend. Her gratitude towards him for all outweighed the fact that he could have quite terrible judgement at times.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Falling so hard for a Chantry initiate that he wanted to escape the Tower and marry her was certainly the worst idea he had ever devised, but it was not the first daft scheme he’d cooked up. But before now she’d always been able to stop him, or talk sense into him, or at least help him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>If the three of them had stayed as close as when they were younger, this would not have happened.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae would see her side, wouldn’t she? Her own flirtation with Cullen was stupid enough, but it was nowhere near the level of idiocy that Jowan was exhibiting. She wasn’t plotting to run away with him, after all.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jowan revealed his whole plan to Nelmirea and begged her help, saying that he was going to be made Tranquil soon, that he knew First Enchanter Irving and Knight-Commander Greigor had signed the order. Lily claimed to have seen the paperwork.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea did not trust Lily. What if she had lied about the Tranquility order so that Jowan would feel desperate enough to risk running away with her? Nelmirea did not know a great deal about the girl’s situation, but she knew that Lily had been given to the Chantry by parents who had too many children to provide for, and had no great love for that life. Nelmirea could sympathize somewhat, since she had been given over as well, but it was still different. If Lily ran away it was unlikely anyone would go after her. There was no phylactery for wayward Sisters and she would not be viewed as a dangerous, unhinged apostate in the outside world. If she did not want a life of celibacy and religious contemplation, stationed at the dark and dour Circle Chapel, but also did not want to have to run away all by herself, she had adequate motivation to rope a fearful and foolish mage apprentice into her escape plan.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea found her suspicions quite plausible, but what’s more, she wanted it to be true. She did not want to believe that Jowan was truly suspected of blood magic and slated for a worse fate than death, but a deep anxious worry within her told that it was entirely likely.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Later, Nelmirea would look back and realize her first mistake was telling Solomae what Jowan was planning. Or perhaps not the first, but at least, the most foolish. She had trusted Solomae. Her heart. Trusted her not to rat them out, because how could she? They looked out for one another, it had always been them against the Tower, whether it was other children bullying one of them or teachers being cruel and dismissive towards Jowan and Nelmirea while fawning sickeningly over Solomae. She had never bought into the whole Teacher’s Pet thing, not truly. Not truly?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>At first Nelmirea thought Solomae was completely on her side. She decried Jowan’s ridiculous notion that the initiate girl loved him and would marry him, and shook her head sadly at his plan to run from the Tower. She dismissed Lily’s claim that Irving and Greagoir had agreed to Tranquilize Jowan because she refused to believe that they suspected Jowan, of all people, of blood magic.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“He’s far too kind and gentle for that,” she had said. “A bit silly and given to worry, yes, but while that might make his Harrowing risky, I just cannot see anyone thinking him a blood mage. Where’s the ambition or the lust for power? It’s too far fetched. Lily must be making it up to gain his allegiance, just as you said. What are you going to do?” she had asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I told him… I told him I would help him,” Nelmirea said, and the look Solomae had given her was of such disappointment it made her cringe away and lower her eyes.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Nelly,” said Solomae, sighing, “you can’t get mixed up in one of his schemes. We’re not apprentices anymore. We need to be serious.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea arched an eyebrow. “Serious? And are you always serious?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae blushed, knowing she was talking about Cullen, but brushed it aside. “Jowan has got himself all worked up over nothing. He should just be patient and wait to pass his Harrowing, which I am certain will come to pass. The last thing he should be doing it trying to escape and run off with Lily. She’ll never go through with it, anyway. Marrying him, I mean. She’ll use him to get away from the Tower and even if they’re halfway to Tevinter before she discards him, that’ll leave Jowan with egg on his face.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I know. I know. I agree completely,” Nelmirea said, nodding feeling relieved that this idea of blood magic and tranquility was absurd. “But he’s so set on it, and I thought that if I helped him he would at least make it out of the Tower. If they catch him before he can escape I shudder to think what they’ll do to him.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What do you mean?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You know what I mean.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh come now. People run away and are brought back all the time. Remember Anders?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes. Yes I do.” Anders was an older apprentice who had swam to his freedom several times, only to be dragged back kicking and screaming every time. Every time but the last, that was. She didn’t know what had become of him. Perhaps he was free, out there somewhere, or perhaps he’d been killed by templars the final time they caught up with him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It won’t be good for him, but perhaps it will sober him up, make him realize how foolish he’s being.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Or perhaps by trying to escape he will make them actually think he is a maleficar.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No one could seriously think that of Jowan.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea shook her head. It might not matter. If he made himself enough of a nuisance they might label him a maleficar just to make it easier to deal with him.  Or the mage-hunters might get carried away and slay him instead of bringing him to Irving and Greagoir for punishment.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I already told him I would help him,” she said, apology in her eyes even as she stood her ground.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“So? Tell him you have changed your mind. Tell him I talked some sense into you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea smiled and shook her head. “If I do that, will you do something for me?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae sighed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Don’t </span>
  <em>
    <span>sigh</span>
  </em>
  <span> at me, </span>
  <em>
    <span>vhenan</span>
  </em>
  <span>. Promise me that you aren’t still playing at courtly love with that templar boy.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Worry not, Nelly. I’m not plotting to jump from the rookery and swim into marital bliss with Cullen,” Solomae said, as if it was all a big joke.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I mean it. Stop with the fluttering eyelashes and notes and… and all of it. I can’t even fathom how you take any joy in it at all. He was going to kill you if you failed your Harrowing, you know.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae’s eyes went dark at that. “That’s not true,” she said, the blue icing over. “That’s just a cruel joke the other templars pulled on him. They know he’s a little sweet on me.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes, which is why they wanted him to kill you. Because they’re sick. They’re sick, evil people, Solomae.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Not Cullen.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Maybe not. But give him time. Have you asked him if he’s ever killed a mage before? Have you asked him if he knows what happens to all those children too young for Harrowings who disappear in the night? Does he know everything his colleagues have done? Does he joke and throw back drinks with men who had cornered mages and threatened to make them Tranquil if they don't get on their knees and—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Stop it, Nelly. You’re unfair. The templars don’t enjoy putting down abominations. They only do what must be done. And as for that other stuff, that’s all just hearsay and rumors. Sometimes children lose control and become possessed. It’s unfortunate but you know some people never make it to their Harrowings. If you were faced with an abomination, you’d have to kill a mage too. You know you would, you wouldn’t just stand there and let it kill you, even if it had once been a child.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea just snorted. She decided to let it slide, for the moment, because Jowan’s current predicament was more important than trying to disabuse Solomae of her trust in templars.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She knew that Solomae would not help Jowan escape, but she had been naive enough to think that she would look the other way if Nelmirea chose to help.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The moment when Nelmirea realized that Solomae had gone to First Enchanter Irving and betrayed them felt like a shattering. To disapprove was one thing. To say it might be best for Jowan to be caught was another. But actively ratting him out was a thing so far outside the realm of what Nelmirea thought she was capable of that for a moment she did not believe it had happened, despite all evidence to the contrary. Despite seeing Solomae walk towards them, close at Irving’s side, her hands folded demurely in front of her as she avoided Nelmirea gaze and looked away instead.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea was still reeling from this betrayal when Jowan revealed that he had been practicing blood magic. Cornered, thwarted in his attempt at escape, he used blood magic to get the upper hand. The fury that poured from him was a shock to witness.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He knocked aside everyone who stood in his way—Irving, Greagoir, Solomae, and the templars who flanked them. Nelmirea went immediately to Solomae, checking her for injuries and monitoring her pulse as she lay unconscious. It was Jowan’s blood fury which rendered her insensate on the floor, and for a few terrible moments Nelmirea thought he had killed her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What have you done?” she shrieked, even as Lily was cowering away from Jowan, telling him to stay away from her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m sorry,” Jowan said, “but I had to do something. I can’t just let them tranquilize me. Solomae should have stayed out of it. You shouldn’t have told her, I didn’t ask </span>
  <em>
    <span>her</span>
  </em>
  <span> to help us.” There was a harsh edge to his voice, and his hand was still dribbling blood onto the floor.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea eyed the puddle by his feet. She wondered how much blood it would take to do something truly terrible.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Just go, just get away from us, Blood Mage!” Lily cried.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The anger drained from his face as he looked from Solomae and Nelmirea to Lily. He reached out his still bloodied hand towards her. “I… I didn’t mean… I just needed—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Leave!” Lily cried, backing away.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jowan looked back to Nelmirea helplessly, and she said what she knew to be the truth. “You better do as she says. They’ll kill you if you’re still here when they come back around.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What about you?” he said. “You helped me, they’ll think the worst. You need to come with me—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No. They still have my phylactery. I’ll just lead them to you. Go, Jowan. Please.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said, stumbling away.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>After a time those who had been knocked out by Joawn’s magic started to come around. Nelmirea was holding Solomae’s hand as she sat up, groaning, but as her eyes cleared and she looked around, she said, “Cullen!” and Nelmirea felt it like an ice spike in the heart.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>One of the templers who had accompanied them groaned in response to the name. With his helmet on he was anonymous, he could have been any of them, but of course Solomae had known. She had come with them, after all. Nelmiera released her hand without a word as she crawled over to him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Are you alright?” she asked, solicitous and gentle.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes, where did the blood mage go?” came his muffled response from behind the mask.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Gone,” Nelmirea answered for her. “Escaped.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Irving and Greagoir were also coming to, and she turned her attention to them. It was time to face the consequences.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It did not go well. Of course it didn’t. How could it? She had been caught red handed breaking into the forbidden Repository, in the name of helping a blood mage.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lily’s reward for her part in the foiled escape was a prison sentence at Aenor, the mage’s prison. Little was known of that place but it was spoken of in hushed whispers, as if it were the Black City itself. For a Chantry initiate with no magic to be sent there was serious indeed, but they suspected that Jowan might have influenced her mind with his blood magic or planted some other treachery in her subconscious, and she was to be evaluated far away from the Tower.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea wondered if she would also be sent there, but that was not the case.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae’s betrayal had been a blow. Jowan’s revelation as a blood mage was another blow.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Knight-Commander Greagoir’s insistence that Solomae and Nelmirea be made Tranquil was the third and final blow which made Nelmirea realize that nothing was going to be as it was, ever again.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae was distraught that her loyalty to the Circle was being punished, and Nelmirea wanted to scream and laugh at the same time.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She’d always thought that Solomae’s belief in the moral justifications of the Circle was a coping mechanism—that she chose to believe that Andraste wanted them to be caged this way, to dull the horror of what had happened to her family in Kirkwall and Crestwood. Nelmirea found no comfort in the Chantry’s teachings, but then she was not human and the Chantry had never been for her. Solomae at least had hope that Blessed Andraste and the Maker might love her if she believed in her own inherent corruption and submitted to the templars rules.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>If she viewed her circumstances with an ounce of the skepticism that Nelmirea did, she would not be able to live her life at all. Nelmirea had forgiven her some measure of foolishness and complacency for this reason. Let her think that the templars were champions of the just, protectors of mages rather than ruthless jailors, if it allowed her to smile. Let her believe in the necessity of her imprisonment if it allowed her to wake each day and not dash her brains out against the rocks. Let her deal with life as a Circle Mage in her own way, so that she could live at all.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>This had been Nelmirea’s way of dealing with having a friend who believed in things she found false. They didn’t have to agree on the Circle at the end of the day because they were both trapped there, regardless. Nemirea chose to endure it and Solomae to embrace it, but it was survival either way.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She’d never dreamed that Solomae would wield that trust in the Circle as a weapon that would injure her. And yet she had, and in the process had injured them both. Had, in fact, sentenced them both to a fate worse than death. She might laugh at the irony, were she allowed to do so.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>All three of them were taken to the dungeon—Solomae, Nelmirea, and Lily—to await their fates. Several templars were brought in to guard them, and Solomae and Nelmirea had their hands bound with suppression cuffs and their mouths gagged.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Cullen was one of the templars who escorted them to their cells and stood guard over them while they awaited their Tranquility.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>His eyes when he looked at Solomae held none of the admiration Nelmirea had once noted there. He looked at her with strained disappointment, as if he actually believed that she was tainted, or even a blood mage herself. Even though she had turned Jowan in and revealed that Nelmirea was helping him, she was deemed guilty by association. That was templar loyalty, for you.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Or maybe he was just afraid of ending up like Lily. After all, it was an open secret that he’d had a crush on Solomae. Lily’s reckless actions were being punished as severely as possible; she was being made an example of for any servant of the Chantry stupid enough to develop feelings for a mage. Perhaps Cullen was taking the warning to heart.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was likely that Greagoir had sent him down there to stand guard in order to show him what a fool Lily had been.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea only cared as much as it affected Solomae, for surely it must hurt her to have Cullen glare at her with such open disappointment and suspicion. Then Nelmirea remembered, once more, that Solomae had betrayed her. Solomae had to have known that Nelmirea would be there, would be implicated in Jowan’s escape attempt and censured for it, even if she had been too naive to realize that the punishment could be anything as severe as this. No, Nelmirea could not sit there facing Tranquility and allow herself to feel sorry for Solomae because her templar boyfriend was mad at her. If anything, she had more reason for disgust and disappointment than Cullen did.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>That made her angry. How dare he stand there with such a wounded expression, as if any of this had anything to do with him? What might he have to worry about? Being tasked with dealing the killing blow?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And then she wondered if the harshness of Solomae’s sentence really was merely because she had been close to Nelmirea and Jowan. Could it be that her flirtation with Cullen made Greagoir want to dispose of her, even knowing that she had turned on her friends and denounced their transgressions? She had always been a shining example of what a mage should be, but tempting a templar to dishonor his vows… yes, that was a sin the Chantry would not abide.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But did it matter? Nelmirea closed her eyes, reminding herself once more that she had Solomae to thank for her current predicament. She had to think about herself, stop fretting over Solomae.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Should she have helped Jowan? Perhaps not, but would it have mattered, in the end? If she kept his escape plans to herself it was likely she might still be here, in the dungeon, magic suppressed and reasons for hope dwindling. Jowan was her friend, and if he had escaped with Lily they would be questioning her. They would never believe that she had nothing to do with it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Maybe it didn’t matter that Solomae had snitched on them. Maybe all roads were bound to lead here.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Maybe she was fated to end up like this.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She thought of her mother’s hope for her, her parents’ conviction that she was on a path towards something greater. A foolish dream, that. She might as well have stayed in the alienage and been cut down by a guard’s blade or molested by a noble for sport. She was doomed to suffer a pitiable end, either way.</span>
</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>
  <span>The Grey Warden arrived like an emissary of Fen’Harel, straight out of the trickster tales Mama Ghil'ana used to tell. He came with a solution, an apparent rescue, but there was a catch. There was always a catch.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He saved them from the death sentence of the Circle’s Rite of Tranquility, but they were not free. They owed their lives to the Wardens now; they had to go where Duncan said, do what he bid, and would eventually face the horrors known as darkspawn. This was a guarantee.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And yet, Nelmirea was suddenly filled with hope. For the first time in a very long time, she felt truly hopeful.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She was going to leave the Tower. She was going to leave the lake. She was going to walk along a road, under the sky, turn her face to the sun, and reach out a hand to feel the grass and the leaves around her. She was going down a path with a purpose, a destination, for the first time in ten years.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae… her heart no longer… was coming with her. Solomae, who had betrayed her, would be a Warden as well.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“How can I ever trust you?” she asked, after they had been ungagged and unbound and sent out of the tower with Duncan and his sandy-haired shadow. “How do I know you won’t betray me again?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I didn’t want to leave,” Solomae said, dully. She didn’t even seem herself. “I don’t want to be here, so I don’t know what you want me to say.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea laughed, bitterly. “I don’t know, ‘Sorry,’ perhaps? You almost got me tranquilized. You almost got </span>
  <em>
    <span>yourself</span>
  </em>
  <span> tranquilized, and for what? Because you thought you could be Irving’s very good girl?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I didn’t know Jowan was a blood mage,” Solomae objected, “Did you?” Her eyes were the icy blue of Lake Calenhad on a winter’s day. It was spring, not winter, but a chill enveloped them both.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea was wearing her new robe, the one Solomae had stitched for her, but even the warm samite lining did not stop her from shivering. The wind blew in off the lake, ruffling her hair, as if Calenhad was not done with her yet.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No, I had no idea. He stopped confiding in me when he became infatuated with Lily.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Don’t blame Lily. Jowan chose evil, out of fear, and you didn’t even notice,” said Solomae. “You were too busy clucking and shaking your head because I smiled at Cullen too much for your liking.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>That stung, but she barreled right over it, her blood rushing to her cheeks as she retorted, “And that makes what you did right?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I went to Irving in order to help Jowan and to keep you from getting sucked into his foolishness,” Solomae retorted. There were lines by her eyes and mouth that belonged on the face of an older woman. “I went to ask him about the allegation that Jowan was to be made Tranquil instead of given a chance to go through the Harrowing. I had to explain that it was Lily who was making the claims.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“And what did he say?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“He confirmed that she was telling the truth and that he knew they were dallying with each other, that he knew everything that goes on with the mages in the tower, no matter how secretive we think we are being.” She looked down at her hands, freed from the suppression cuffs but absent a staff to hold.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“So you were afraid he was going to censure you over Cullen, is that it? You gave me and Jowan up to escape your own punishment?” Nelmirea’s voice rose, and the younger warden turned to look at them warily. He had the eyes of a templar, or maybe that’s just how everyone looked at mages outside the Tower. Not Duncan, though. Ser Duncan had kind eyes.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No! That’s not it at all. He explained why they believed Jowan was unstable and why they thought a harrowing would mean his death.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Better that than tranquil.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae shook her head. “I told him about Jowan’s plan because I thought he would discover it regardless. I wanted him to understand that you had nothing to do with it, not really, that he was just using you and taking advantage of your kindness.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea snorted. “You still betrayed us. I don’t even know you anymore. Maybe I never did.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Maybe not,” said Solomae, looking away. “You’ve clearly not been listening to me all this time.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh? And what have you been saying?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae’s face looked thin and drawn. No hint of dimples. The pearls in her hair were dull in the overcast sunlight filtering down through the cloud cover.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I betrayed my family to the Circle,” she said. “And I didn’t regret it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>That silenced Nelmirea for a good long while.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Templar Boy (The Road)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>As fraught as things were with Solomae, it could not wholly erase the joy of being outside. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Spring in Ferelden meant muddy roads, sudden downpours, temperatures that fluctuated between balmy and frigid from one hour to the next. Everything was brown around them, the starkness of winter clinging to the landscape like the lingering memory of a dream, though bursts of brilliant green speckled the bare tree limbs and dusted the hills and valleys around them.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They traveled north through the Bannoran, heading back up towards Highever. Nelmirea could have laughed at the irony of it, that her newfound freedom from the Tower meant going back home, though not for the reasons she would have chosen. They were not going to visit the alienage and reconnect with her parents. Instead, Ser Duncan planned to attend a tourney outside the city gates before turning to Highever Castle to visit Teyrn and Teyrna Cousland.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea kept her sudden hope close to her heart. Ten years had passed, but if her parents still labored industriously at the Highever castle, she might be able to find them. If she could break away from the Wardens long enough to visit the stables she might see her father, mucking out a stall, brushing down a horse, or feeding the mabari. She might happen upon her mother carrying loads of laundry across the courtyard, hanging it to dry, or gathering clean water from the well for rinsing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>These imagined scenarios dominated her thoughts as they traveled. It was easier to ignore Solomae, to not even speak to her, than to deal with the betrayal and what it meant, now. For all that had happened, Solomae was the only constant, her old friend, in this wide new world. They would be Wardens together, so there was no escaping the gulf that had opened between, or her own shattered feelings.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea did not warm to their new travel companions. She was grateful to Duncan for saving her from the Circle, but she was well aware that he was as much her guardian now as the Knight-Commander and his templars had been. She wondered what he would do if she tried to flee, if she tried to disappear into the woods or waited until they got near Highever and fled to the alienage. Would he chase after her? Would he kill her? Would he send to Denerim for her phylactery and trace her that way?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She did not intend to find out. The Grey Wardens were a legendary, if mysterious, organization. She could do much worse as an apostate elf running for her life, trying to hide from the Chantry. She had no intention of leaving the Wardens. Still, she remained quiet and reserved around them. They were strangers, and though they seemed respectful enough, she did not think she could ever let her guard down around human men.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They camped for the night, halfway to Highever, and Solomae struck up a conversation with the younger warden, Alistair. Nelmirea eavesdropped, pretending outwardly that she did not care, keeping her head down and eyes lowered as she spooned stew into her mouth.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Have you been with the wardens long?” Solomae asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No, not long. It’s been… oh about six months, I guess. Feels like longer, though. I mean, in a good way. Like it’s the right life for me and sometimes I forget I haven’t always been here, you know?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I felt that way about the Circle,” Solomae said. “When I first arrived it felt as if that was where I was always meant to be.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Really?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The dubiousness in Alistair’s tone made Nelmirea surreptitiously lift her eyes to appraise him. She saw him raise one eyebrow and smile doubtfully at Solomae.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes? Why does that surprise you?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I just thought… weren’t you caught trying to escape the Tower…?”</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>“No,” </span>
  </em>
  <span>she denied, eyes flashing. He put one hand up in placation and shook his head, but she clarified quickly, “I would never. I got caught up with someone who did, though. A blood mage.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Right, I did hear that part.” Alistair glanced over to where Duncan was seated a little ways away, cleaning his armor and giving the younger wardens space to chat over the fire. “Sorry, I got it confused. I didn’t mean to imply… well I don’t know, anything.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I was quite happy at the tower,” Solomae claimed, “unlike some,” and she looked towards Nelmirea pointedly. Nelmirea ducked her head, caught eavesdropping, and jabbed her wooden spoon into the thick stew with irritated embarrassment.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Neither of you are blood mages, though?” Alistair asked, uneasily. “I mean, the blood mage fellow, he escaped.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I had nothing to do with his activities. It was all a misunderstanding.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I see.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They were both quiet, and Nelmirea’s scalp prickled with the sensation of being watched. She thought that they were looking at her; contemplating her and wondering if she had been up to no good with Jowan. The suspicion of blood magic would always follow her, now, and she wondered grumpily if she should just start encouraging the idea rather than denying it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I wouldn’t blame you if you were happy to leave the tower, you know,” Alistair said after a long moment. “I know I would be.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There was a smile in Solomae’s voice when she responded, “Oh? You don’t think you would make a very good mage?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No, I don’t. I barely made a passable templar,” he said, with a chuckle.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“A templar?” Nelmeria gave up all pretense of not listening to the conversation. She looked at Alistair with new mistrust. “I didn’t know you were a templar.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He gazed at her in surprise, as if he’d thought she were a mute. “No? I guess… well it didn’t come up. I was never really a templar, though.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Explain.” Nelmirea spat the one word out like an interrogator.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Alistair cast a questioning glance over to Solomae, as if to ask if he had to speak to her strange elven friend. Solomae twirled one hand nervously in her hair, playing with one of her pearls, and she just raised both eyebrows at him expectantly.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I was a templar initiate,” he said, “sent to the Chantry by my guardian when I was a boy. But I never made it to being a full templar—I was never stationed in a Circle, I didn’t take the oaths, and I never took lyrium. I would have done, if Duncan hadn’t come to rescue me.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Rescue you?” Nelmirea echoed, narrowing her eyes. “I didn’t know that templars were prisoners.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Well, no, but I didn’t really have anywhere else to go.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Are you an orphan?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He was clearly uncomfortable under her interrogation, drawing back and squirming, continually looking to Solomae or across camp to Duncan as if they might rescue him from the scary elf. But when Solomae was silent and Duncan continued to pointedly ignore their conversation, he said, “Yes,” with such a snappish tone that Nelmirea almost didn’t believe him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Still, you’re an adult now, aren’t you? If you didn’t like being a templar you could have left and, I don’t know, gone anywhere?” Nelmirea waved her spoon in the air, illustrating the wide open world of Thedas. “A human man, young, able-bodied, with sword skills? What do you need rescuing from?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m sorry,” Solomae said, finally, taking pity on him. “Nelly hates Templars. I do not think you’ll be able to say anything that will placate her.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I see,” said Alistair, thoughtfully. He relaxed visibly, his shoulders lowering, as if Solomae’s words were a calming spell. He tossed a pinecone to the fire. “Well, it wouldn’t be the first time I met a mage who hated me straight away.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I never said that. Solomae doesn’t speak for me,” Nelmirea denied. “I just never got the impression that the templars were forced to do what they did. It seemed like a rather desirable job, actually.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I wouldn’t say that,” Alistair disagreed. “I don’t know anyone who dreams of being a glorified prison guard when they grow up. Most of the templar initiates I knew were there because they were poor; orphans, bastards, or just had too many older siblings.” He shrugged. “My mother died when I was born and my father… well he’s gone now, too.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m sorry,” Solomae said, and reached out to put a hand on his arm. Nelmirea rolled her eyes in disgust, and Alistair looked down at her hand like he’d never seen a hand before and didn’t know what it was. “But you are happy in the Wardens?” she asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Um, yeah. Yes. It’s miles better than the Chantry,” Alistair said, scooching back so that Solomae’s hand slipped away from his arm. “They don’t drone on with the Chant of Light and all that all day long, so, immediate win.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Not religious?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He just shrugged, then decided to elaborate after all, “Sure, maybe there’s a Maker and all that, but I’m not as enthusiastic as the Sisters at the Cloister. And no, I didn’t feel like guarding mages was some holy calling like they said. I figured that was just a way to make the task seem more sacrosanct than it really is.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae drew her hand back into her lap and fiddled with the edge of her sleeve. “Templars provide an invaluable service,” she said, “safe-guarding the world from uncontrolled magic, and protecting mages from our own weakness and vice.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No one protects the mages from the templars’ weakness, though,” Nelmirea said, and Solomae sighed. But Alistair nodded as if she had a point.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“So, are you supposed to be watching over us? Guarding us? Is that why Ser Duncan brought you along?” Solomae asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He laughed, a sudden loud laugh as if she’d surprised him with the question, caught him off guard. Nelmirea stared impassively at him, not understanding the joke. It was a reasonable enough assumption, wasn’t it? Bring the ex-templar along to the Mage Tower? Especially since Duncan had conscripted two mages sentenced to tranquility for associations with blood magic.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No,” Alistair said, sobering up when he realized both mages were staring at him in unblinking stoicism. “No one watches over the mages in the Grey Wardens. You’re responsible for yourselves.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>That might have been the most magical phrase Nelmirea had ever heard. Solomae looked alarmed, though, twisting the edge of her sleeve into a knot in her palm. “What if we become abominations?” she asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Well… don’t.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea allowed a smile to creep its way onto her face, starting at one corner of her mouth. Solomae’s expression of disbelieving wonder was a sight to behold.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Alistair shifted and reached out to poke at the fire with a stick. “You’ve been through your Harrowings, haven’t you?” His tone added an unspoken condescension; </span>
  <em>
    <span>You’re big girls, you figure it out.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes,” Nelmirea confirmed. “But what if we are actually </span>
  <em>
    <span>evil</span>
  </em>
  <span> blood mages, hmm? Cast out of the circle, taken in by foolish wardens, free now to wreak havoc on unsuspecting Thedas?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Alistair frowned, not appreciating her sarcasm, and said, “I hope that’s not the case. But I’m not the best person to ask about being a mage in the order. There’ll be other Warden mages back at Ostagar, you can ask them how it works. Mostly we’re all just working towards a common goal.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“And what is that goal, exactly?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He glanced over towards Duncan again, as if wondering whether his commander had told them anything at all. “Stop the Blight, save puppies, look good in blue,” he said, cavalier, and smiled at her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea stared at him with a flat, level gaze and a neutral mouth that did not hint at a smile in return. She felt self-conscious in her lavender robe with its blue butterflies, and did not wish him to think he could charm her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Because the Warden uniform is blue and white,” he clarified, smile faltering.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I look excellent in blue,” said Solomae, though her own robes were a drab green and brown. “It brings out my eyes.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m sure it does,” Alistair said, but his posture was uneasy, as if he recognized the attempt at flirtation but did not trust it. Nelmirea hoped he stayed that way, until Solomae gave it up, because she was just about sick to death of watching Solomae flirt with templars.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Beware, beware... (The Road)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Highever was a disappointment.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They did not venture near the alienage, and there was no sign of her parents at Highever castle.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The visit to the castle was surreal. Their hosts were the young twins, Elissa and Aedan. She had never met the Cousland twins when she was a child, but she’d known of them. How could she not? They were close in age to her and they represented everything she could not have in life: rich, well educated, pampered, doted on by their parents, and waited on hand and foot by hers.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She had resented the very idea of Elissa Cousland when she was a child. Now she found herself following Elissa around the castle, an honored guest, and she had to listen to the girl’s dreadfully dull patter about paintings. Elissa showed them the library, which she seemed rather proud of, and Nelmirea was glad to be able to one-up her at last, commenting that the Circle library was easily five times as large.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She did not mention that she hadn’t been a very good student and had only read a tiny fraction of the books housed in the Circle Tower.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Elissa did not know if Nelmirea’s parents still worked at the castle, and couldn’t be bothered to go ask Teyrna Eleanor, the true mistress of the household. It was almost more insulting to hear her come up with excuses than if she had admitted outright that she just didn’t see the point and didn’t want to waste her time trying to find out. She did disappear for a few minutes, claiming that she was going to consult the ledgers to see if anyone named Surana was on staff, but she was hardly gone long enough to have made much of an effort.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea told herself it had been foolish to hope for a family reunion at Highever. It did no good to dwell on the past.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Her parents might have left the Highever region after she was taken away. Perhaps they’d gone to Denerim, where her father was from, originally, and made a new home there. Maybe they were dead. Or maybe they were still in the Highever alienage, so close but so far away.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She did not ask Duncan to make a detour.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>When she had left the tower, she had done so without her mother’s letters or her carved halla. She had nothing but the robes on her back. They had not even let either of them take a staff with them. They would have to get new ones at Ostagar, Duncan told them.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea didn’t care about that. She and Solomae had only been allowed basic apprentice level staves and so they were no great loss. But the letters… losing the letters had been like losing a piece of her soul.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She had read and re-read them so many times over the years that she had them mostly memorized, but she feared those memories fading over time. The insult itself was palpable. First Enchanter Irving had said that all their personal things had been seized and were being inspected as evidence of a possible blood mage cabal within the tower, and Nelmirea smarted to think of the templars reading her mother’s letters and… and what? Speculating that they contained secret incantations written in code? It was ridiculous and maddening.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But at least she was free of that place. Free of the suffocating circle, free of the templars’ watchful gazes that she was not allowed to return in kind.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>When Alistair watched her she met his eyes, boldly. She jutted out her chin and raised her eyebrows in a challenge, and he would look away, guiltily.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She did not have any particular problem with him, not on a personal level, and truth be told it was amusing when he made sarcastic and irreverent quips about the Chantry. But there was still a wariness about him which reminded her that he’d been trained to see mages as inherent threats, to not let them sneak up on him, and to suspect that somehow they were always up to no good. That deeply ingrained templar instinct oozed from him and grated on her nerves.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>So she challenged him. One might even say she tormented him. She refused to laugh at his jokes—she made him explain every one of them until the jest was ruined. She made hints, often, about her love for blood magic and child sacrifice, in such a way that was obviously a joke… or was it? She would speak snatches of elvhen at him and watch him struggle to figure out whether or not it was a curse.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae still tried to deal with him the opposite way, being deferential and complementary, and it was almost hilarious to see how Alistair just retreated more and more from her the nicer she tried to be. Soon she would give up on him. Nelmirea found it raised her spirits to be able to mock Solomae, even if only in her own private thoughts. It distracted from the grief that lurked in quiet moments when she had nothing else to occupy her mind.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>After the trip to Highever their numbers grew. Duncan recruited two knights, Ser Jory and Ser Roderick, and then he parted from them to go visit the underground Dwarven city of Orzammar. Alistair was left in charge of the new recruits on their journey back to Ostagar with the Cousland army, and Nelmirea allowed her eyes to glimmer with mischief when he looked her way.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But in truth she had not planned to be a problem. She planned to keep to herself and get to Ostagar without much fuss. She did not intend for things to get bad.</span>
</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p>
  
</p><p>
  <span>Whenever the Highever army camped for the night the Grey Wardens followed suit, setting up their tents and bedrolls adjacent to the encampment. But they still stayed a little apart, even Ser Roderick who had so lately been recruited from the Cousland’s personal guard. He, Ser Jory, and Alistair all seemed to be getting along quite well. Though the march south had been long and arduous so far, they still had the energy to joke and laugh and get out their swords to spar with each other in the evenings.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea had no desire to mingle with the Highever soldiers or spar with her fellow Wardens. She still had no staff and she suspected that if she started flinging bursts of magical energy their way they would not take to it kindly.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Sometimes when sparring the men would glance over their way, as if to check to see if the young mages were watching and appreciating their warrior prowess. It was all very boring. Almost as boring as the way she and Solomae tip-toed around each other when setting up and breaking down camp, speaking seldom and then only as if they were strangers. Perhaps they were strangers.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was too much, this cold and silent distance. She had to break it, to make it end, but she did not know how to extend a hand of forgiveness when Solomae had not asked for it, had not apologized, did not think she had been wrong. How can you forgive someone who is not sorry?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>So she broke the truce the only way she knew how—with cruelty.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The boys were swinging their swords around and Nelmirea was alone with her bitterness, wondering why she could not be content with the joy of being outside during a Fereldan spring, when she looked over at a Solomae and saw her smiling at Alistair again.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She got up and walked the distance cross camp to sit back down beside her. For a moment she was silent and her gaze was focused forwards. Solomae said nothing and the only sound was the clang and hiss of blades striking blades, and the good natured laughter of the men.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Then Nelmirea said, “You’ve been acting a fool these past few days.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Have I?” Solomae responded sharply, giving her a surprised and suspicious glance. “I am not the one making jibes about blood magic at every turn.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I am making fun of the templar. You’re trying to get him into your bedroll. Which is the more foolish?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae set down the soup bowl she had been holding and gave Nelmirea a look so cold it might have caused a blizzard in the Frostbacks. “When did you become such a jealous and judgmental shrew?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Jealous?” Nelmirea laughed disdainfully. “Don’t be stupid. I have no interest in him.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Nor do I. I am being friendly towards a new comrade who is clearly the favorite of the Commander to whom we owe our lives. It’s called survival, Nelmirea. You may want to self-destruct but I am trying to make the best of a bad situation.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh, it’s all strategy, is it? Is that what you were doing with Cullen? All that flirting was just a way to gain an ally among the templars?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Why does it matter to you, so much?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Because it didn’t work the first time and it won’t work now,” Nelmirea told her. “Cullen did not stand up for you when you were thrown in the dungeon with me and Alistair won’t have your back, either. You keep looking to templars for support and ignoring the people who might actually help you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Are you talking about yourself and Jowan? You still think Jowan a trustworthy friend, even after he revealed himself to be a blood mage?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You should have minded your own business instead of betraying us to Irving,” Nelmirea snapped. “If you hadn’t been determined to be so high and mighty, Jowan and Lily would be free and you would still be the star pupil in your precious Circle.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“And you would still be trapped in the Circle you so hate!” Solomae cried, her voice rising sharply in the air. “It seems you are the only one who got exactly what she always wanted out of this, yet you are as bitter and angry as ever!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The clang of swords stopped, but Nelmirea hardly noticed that their argument had drawn attention. “I got what I wanted?” she shot back, matching the timbre of Solomae’s shout. “You have </span>
  <em>
    <span>no </span>
  </em>
  <span>idea what I want. You never did.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae stood up and made as if to walk away from her, towards her tent, but Nelmirea refused to let it end in cold silence. She got up and strode quickly after her, adding, “We are stuck together and I will not stand by and watch you do the exact same things outside the tower as you did inside.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae stopped and twisted around. “You don’t control me, Nelly, you don’t get to decide how I behave or whom I make friends with. I tried to help you before, to stop you from getting caught up with Jowan’s schemes, but I cannot keep worrying about you, now. You should stop concerning yourself with my affairs.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea stopped just short of colliding with her, surprised by the quick pivot. “I’m not the one who betrayed you! I didn’t tell Irving or Greagoir that you were flirting with a templar, because I knew they would punish you for seducing one of the champions of the just,” she said, letting sarcasm and disdain ooze from her words. “Do not get it backwards. You are the betrayer. You!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Then leave me alone,” Solomae hissed, stepping forward to get up right in her face. Her voice was low, almost a whisper, now. “Play your game the way you see fit and let me do what I think is best. We do not need to care for each other in any way from now on. I release you from whatever burden of friendship compels you to criticize me.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea could feel her breath brush across her face with each word. She inched closer, crooking her lip into a sneer. “If I never had to look at your face again I would be glad of it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hey now, what’s going on?” It was Alistair’s voice, interrupting them, slightly breathless as if he’d run over to them. Nelmirea did not turn to look at him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Nothing,” she snapped, clenching her fists, staring directly into Solomae’s eyes. “Nothing that concerns you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Alistair grabbed her arm and pulled her away from Solomae. The move shocked her so much she responded on instinct, her magic rushing to her defense, power coiling in her palms and behind her eyes, on the tip of her tongue. But before she could do anything, Alistair was struck in the middle of his breastplate by a crackling missile of energy, and he yelped in pain and surprise. He let go of her arm and staggered back, clutching his chest.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea stared at him dumbly before turning to look back at Solomae. She was crouched in a battle stance, her eyes aglow and her hands cupping balls of white hot mana. But it dissipated in a moment and she straightened, an expression of chagrin washing over her features.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Don’t touch her,” she said, but her voice was wobbly, as if surprised at herself.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Alistair had been holding his sword, but he sheathed it and raised both hands in surrender. “I’m just stopping the two of you from fighting,” he said. “No one’s trying to hurt anyone.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Ser Roderick and Ser Jory hovered in the background, keeping their distance but their swords drawn.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We were having an argument, not killing each other,” Nelmirea said. “It wasn’t any of your business.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Look,” Alistair snapped, not bothering trying to hide his annoyance, “I have one job, and that’s get the four of you down to Ostagar alive and in one piece.” He dropped his hands, planting one on the pommel of his sword and the other on his hip. “You looked like you were about to throw down with each other and I can’t have that. I have to answer to Duncan for whatever you do.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea opened her mouth to say </span>
  <em>
    <span>I don’t care </span>
  </em>
  <span>but what came out instead was, “Don’t worry, templar, we won’t be fighting anymore,” and turned to walk away. She didn’t know where she was heading. It wasn’t towards her tent, because to head that way she would have to walk past Solomae. Instead she strode purposefully off towards the larger encampment where the Highever army was resting.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Alistair did not stop her, though he might be alarmed to see her heading away from the Warden camp off towards the army where she could get into more trouble. It hadn’t been her who had shot a magic missile off at his chest, though, had it? That had been perfect, friendly Solomae, who usually had nothing but smiles and coy words for him. Perhaps all his suspicion of her was finally justified. A mage is a mage is a mage, after all.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea stopped once she was far enough away to be out of sight behind a small stand of trees, then sunk down to sit cross-legged in the long grass. Solomae had attacked Alistair because he put his hand on her, and the knowledge created a crack in the ice that threatened to freeze her. She didn’t want that crack to widen, though. She wanted to hold onto her anger. Wanted to cling to the mistrust that Solomae had earned, for if she did not thaw she could not be betrayed again.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She closed her eyes and breathed in the wet spring scent of mud and new grass around her. It awoke memories ten years past of Highever springs before she had been shut inside the circle. Picking lavender with her mother. Playing in the streets with the other children. She opened her eyes. A butterfly, its wings a gradient of purple and blue, was lazily perched on a sprig of white flowers a few feet in front of her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea breathed out long and slow, reaching towards the insect with her mind. It stirred, twitching its antennae and exercising its wings slowly, bringing them together and apart for a few languid moments. Then it fluttered into the air and flew to land on her hand. She flexed her fingers and sent it flying up into the sky beyond the blades of grass, sending out tendrils of magic into the flowers all around her. Several blue butterflies rose up from the undergrowth to join the first, forming into a flock, and they swirled about in pleasant harmony for a few moments, until she sent them back towards camp.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Then she lay down in the grass, not caring that the air was cooling as the sun inched towards the horizon and late afternoon turned to twilight.</span>
</p><p>
  
</p>
<hr/><p>
  
</p><p>
  <span>In camp, Solomae was sitting alone, her head down, worried at her own outburst and the fear and distrust she saw on the faces of the men now. She had tried so hard to be seen as something other than an outcast mage, a Circle reject to be feared, and it was all gone in an instant of anger, a protective instinct that burst forth in violence.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>After Nelmirea had stormed off into the trees, Solomae had apologized for striking Alistair and asked if he needed healing. The look he had given her was incredulous, then he just shook his head and walked back towards Ser Jory and Ser Roderick. Their glances were no less wary as they turned their backs on her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>To think she had been worried that it was Nelmirea who would alienate their new Grey Warden friends, as she had so often alienated the other mages at the Circle. Nelmirea was the one with the temper, the sharp words, not her. She worked so hard to keep her mind open and her words measured. She would not have thought until a few moments ago that she could be the one to lose control and lash out. But in that moment, when Alistair had grabbed Nelmirea’s arm and yanked her away, her small body jerking like a doll's, all Solomae’s training and self-control was gone in a burst of fear and anger.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The fear was always there. That the templars could do anything they wanted. Even outside the Circle walls. It was a hard instinct to unlearn. After all these years trying to learn to coexist with templars in the Circle Tower, her father's voice still whispered to her, </span>
  <em>
    <span>Beware, beware...</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>She got up to retreat inside her tent, away from Nelmirea’s accusations of betrayal and Alistair’s mistrustful glares. As she stood to go, she saw a flock of butterflies riding the breeze, and paused. They descended around her, circling her in an unnatural fashion, like a gust of wind compelled them to her. The small cyclone of fluttering wings swooshed through the air, causing her hair and clothes to flutter in the wind with them. Then the flock rose up into the sky and dispersed, each insect going its own way once more.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae shivered, and looked out towards the trees. Was this forgiveness, she wondered, or goodbye?</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. A Taste of Blood (Ostagar)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>By the time they reached Ostagar they had settled once again into an uneasy truce. They spoke little, and only of inconsequential things, but they kept themselves apart from the others, too.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae no longer tried to flirt with Alistair, having finally taken the hint that he did not trust her as far as he could throw her… or perhaps she just felt awkward that she had unleashed her magic upon him and did not want to push the matter. Nelmirea did not ask. She no longer wished to push the matter, either.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She had gotten her way, more or less. She had been irritated at Solomae’s behavior, but now that she was more subdued it didn’t make Nelmirea feel any better. The three men, Alistair and the knights, still got along very well, and watching them talk, and joke, and laugh, and spar in the evening, made her feel all the more lonely. She wished she could be conversing and laughing with Solomae, or Jowan, but her friends were lost to her, even though one was still so close.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Fresh upon arrival at Ostagar, they were introduced to two other new recruits, both elves, and Nelmirea was surprised and somewhat shy to meet more of her people in the Grey Warden ranks. Korren Tabris hailed from the alienage in Denerim, and Lythra Mahariel came from the deep woods of the Brecilian.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She asked Korren if he knew any Suranas back at the alienage, and to her surprise he nodded, and said, “Oh… yes. There are a few Suranas. Anyone in particular you know?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Her father had been born and raised in Denerim, and had only come to Highever in order to marry her mother. So it should not be a surprise that more of his family populated the Denerim alienage, but it filled her with unexpected hope. “Did you know Alrand and Iossa?” she asked. “A married couple, they’d be close to 40 by now… maybe they have children, but maybe not.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He smiled vaguely and tilted his head in thought. “Alrand, yes,” he said with a nod. “That name does ring a bell. Alrand Surana. He works in the king’s stables… came back from Highever a few years ago.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes… yes! That’s my father.” So Father </span>
  <em>
    <span>had</span>
  </em>
  <span> gone back to Denerim. But… “What of his wife, Iossa?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m not sure, I don’t recall him having a wife. Or children. Sorry, I don’t know the Surana family well,” Korren said, apologetic. “But, from what I recall of Alrand, I think he lives with his parents and keeps to himself, mostly.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“But he was well? When last you were home, I mean.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes, as far as I know.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She nodded, fighting to stay calm and composed in front of this stranger. Her father was alive and lived in Denerim with his parents… her grandparents, that would mean. How odd to think she still had grandparents in the world. She did not remember her mother’s parents, they had both died when she was very young, and she had never given much thought to her father’s people. They lived far away in a place she never expected to visit.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But if Father had gone home to his family without Mother… what did that mean? Had her departure to the Circle broken her parents’ marriage? Did they fear having more children because of her magic, because they couldn’t risk another loss, and so they had split up? Or was Mother…? No, she couldn’t think that.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>...I have thought of you every day for these past ten years…</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>More mages arrived at Ostagar, sent by the Circle to aid in the battle, but both Nelmirea and Solomae kept their distance. The other circle mages knew that they had been expelled and nearly tranquilized, and were clearly suspicious of them. They were also all much older; mages who had long ago passed their Harrowings and graduated past apprenticeship, so she didn’t know most of them except in passing. Wynne, she recognized, though the older woman didn’t recognize her. It was just as well.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She was a Grey Warden now and it would be best to never look back towards the Circle and the people who remained there. Jowan was no longer there, so there were no friends to miss or to worry about. She wondered what would happen to him, on the run, using blood magic out of desperation. His phylactery was broken so she did not think they would recapture him easily.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eventually Duncan also arrived at Ostagar, dragging two dwarves in tow, both of them complaining about the vast frightening expanse of the endless sky. Others made jokes about their ignorant fear, but Nelmirea had been locked in a tower with no view of the sky for half her life, and thought she might understand their discombobulation.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Soon after Duncan’s return, they were all sent into the wilds to kill darkspawn and gather vials of blood as part of the Warden recruitment process.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lythra and Korren were sent out to supervise them. It bolstered Nelmirea’s spirits to see that two elves were given leadership over the other recruits. It signified that the Wardens were not so prejudiced as other institutions in Thedas, perhaps. But, she reminded herself that they were not mages. She wondered if there would ever be respect and trust for her within the Warden ranks, or if they would always be wary and suspicious the way Alistair and the two knights had been all the way south. Though there were other Warden mages, as Alistair had said, they were all too busy to stop and converse with a new recruit who was not even advanced to the lowly rank of Warden-Ensign.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She saw darkspawn for the first time out in the wilds, and they were terrible to behold. She had never pictured them as being so close in kinship to humans, elves, and dwarves, before. She had read of them in the Circle’s books, but in her minds’ eye she pictured beasts. These were monsters but they were twisted versions of the sentient races of Thedas, and she shuddered to look upon them. They reminded her now of the abominations that the mages lived in fear of becoming.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But she was with a large group, six fighters strong, and so the trip into the Wilds passed without any losses. Lythra and Korren could sense the darkspawn around them and so there was no danger of being ambushed or caught unawares.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Quickly, she became energized by the battles they fought against small bands of darkspawn in the swamp. She had a staff, now, one given to her by the quartermaster at Ostagar, and for the first time in her life she was encouraged—required, even—to unleash the full destructive force of her magic.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She pretended the monsters wore gleaming templar armor instead of the tarnished hodge-podge of scavenged metals the darkspawn clad themselves in, and relished when they fell to the magic from her staff.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lythra talked of having met a Chasind witch the last time they had ventured out to scout in the wilds, but this time they encountered no one besides the darkspawn. Nelmirea wondered if this was the sort of place Jowan would end up, a hostile wilderness where few civilized people ventured to hunt down apostates. It seemed a depressing fate for him. If only Lily had gone with him it might not matter where he ended up, for at least they’d have each other. But that romantic dream had never been anything but nonsense. How could a Chantry initiate ever truly love and trust a blood mage? Or a mage of any kind?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Once they had killed enough of their quarry and gathered up a vial of blood for each of the new recruits, as proof of their valor in battle, they returned to the camp within the walls of the ruin.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was only then that Nelmirea discovered the true nature of Warden recruitment, the secret behind the Joining ceremony, and the awful price initiates must pay.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was blood magic. There was no sugar coating it, for they were made to drink a magical concoction brewed in secret from the fresh darkspawn blood they had brought back from their hunt. It was ironic that she had been censured in the Circle for helping a blood mage, even unwittingly, and now she was part of an order which used blood magic in their secretive rite of initiation.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Ser Roderick was first to volunteer to take the drink, and they all watched in horror as it killed him. His death was painful and prolonged, and there was nothing that could be done to save him, though Solomae tried to cast a healing spell over him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Duncan shook his head sadly, and said, “You cannot help him. There is no magic which can counteract the Joining’s effects. He will be honored, his sacrifice not forgotten.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Alistair dragged a hand down his face, looking down at Ser Roderick in dismay, but there was no surprise there. He’d known… of course he’d known, because he’d have had to go through the same process six months back.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>In all the time they spent traveling south under his supervision, Alistiar had never breathed a word of warning. Lythra and Korren had been equally tight-lipped while escorting them into the swamp, giving no hints about what was in store.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“This is blood magic,” Solomae stated the obvious, holding Ser Roderick’s lifeless head in her lap, still upset that her healing magic had been nothing to the poisonous brew. “I don’t want anything to do with this.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“This is sacrifice,” Duncan said solemnly. “The risk is necessary to become a Warden. You must drink. There is no turning back, now.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I never had a choice.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Her words drew a dour frown from Duncan, and there was a wary glimmer in his eyes that set Nelmirea on edge. He was looking at Solomae now as if she were a threat. Like the templars had always looked upon them. She edged closer to Solomae, wanting to </span>
  <em>
    <span>shush</span>
  </em>
  <span> her and tell her now was not the time to be speaking out, but Ser Jory drew Duncan’s attention away before she need bother.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I still have a choice. I cannot take part in this,” Ser Jory objected, stammering and backing away, sweat glistening on his brow. “I have a wife and child. There’s no glory in this. It is one thing to risk death in battle, but this is sucide and folly!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Duncan turned from Solomae to the knight, and approached him with the goblet. He murmured words in a calming voice, but they were insistent words, telling Ser Jory it was too late to turn back and that he could not refuse the Joining.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea watched, frozen in horror, as Ser Jory tried first to flee the ceremony and then drew his sword on Duncan. His defiance was as futile as Solomae’s magic. Duncan paused only long enough to hand the goblet to Alistair before pulling his dagger out and advancing upon Jory. The fight was quick. Jory’s death was assured the moment he crossed the Warden Commander.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea moved instinctively towards Solomae, thinking that Duncan might turn his wrath upon her next, because she had spoken out. Solomae stood slowly, letting Ser Roderick’s body slide to the flagstones. Her robes were stained with the blood he had spat up. She gazed down at him with a cold, numb expression, her lips drawn thin and her eyes taking on a faraway look.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The man had been cordial to them, a gentleman, but had never really trusted either of the mages, and had kept his distance from them on the journey south. Nelmirea found it ironic that he should die in Solomae’s arms, that Solomae was the only one who even tried to help him. Alistair, with whom Roderick had become quite friendly, had not even moved towards him when he fell to the ground coughing up blood. Perhaps he’d known the moment Roderick doubled over in pain after his first sip that he was already dead.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Duncan eyed them warily, his dagger still drawn, Ser Jory’s blood dripping from the blade to mingle with Ser Roderick’s on the ground. Alistair held the goblet for him, looking… ashamed, perhaps? Or he was just worried that there would be more non-compliance from the recruits. She met his eye briefly, and he just shook his head.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She was acutely aware, now, of Korren and Lythra standing behind them, their hands on their weapons. They were prepared to follow Duncan’s lead and kill anyone who refused to drink. There really was no going back, now, unless all four remaining recruits united to fight back against the four Wardens. Even then, how could they expect to escape Ostagar after killing the Commander of the Wardens and his right hand man?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Duran Aeducan cut the tension by stepping forward and grimly volunteering to take the next drink. He and the other dwarven recruit took their sips without much fuss, as if to put the human knights to shame for their weakness. Ser Roderick’s constitution had failed to endure and Ser Jory’s courage had failed him… or at least that is how a devoted Warden might see it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea was beginning to think the Wardens were no better than the Circle she had left behind. What was the Joining but a Harrowing, by another name?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea drank when it was her turn, because she had no choice. It was either drink and possibly die or refuse and definitely die. She briefly cursed Jowan and his faithless lover before drinking it, but did not curse Solomae and her betrayal, for Solomae was still beside her and needed no curse other than the trial she was about to face.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The potion was disgusting; it tasted of bitterness and bile, of poisoned blood and the sludge of a thousand years of malice. Nelmirea blacked out after drinking it and was surprised when she woke up alive, her head resting on the lap of Korren Tabris, the elf from Denerim.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She sat up slowly, her head pounding and her nauseated stomach threatening to expel both the poisonous elixir and the food she had eaten that day. She tried not to think about lamb stew and instead focus on things outside herself.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She looked around and saw both dwarves, Aeducan and Brosca, already standing again, though they were grumbling about headaches and the bad taste left in their mouths. Duncan was with them, speaking to them in low and solemn tones, though she couldn’t make out his words. Alistair was working on dragging away the bodies Ser Roderick and Ser Jory, and Solomae… Solomae was cradled in the lap of Lythra Mahariel, unmoving.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea scrambled to her knees and crawled over to where Solomae lay. “Is she...?” she asked, unable to get the word “dead” out before her throat closed up around it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No,” Lythra answered. “She’s still with us, but she hasn’t come round yet. It takes some longer than others. At least that’s what Duncan said.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea wasn’t sure how much stock she should put into what Duncan had to say, anymore. She had been grateful when he saved her from the fate worse than death that the templars had planned for her, but she thought he could have told them the truth about the Joining before the last minute. And poor Ser Jory… he had a wife and a child. If the Wardens had been honest and up front about the nature of their order, would he have joined in the first place? No. What a waste. What a terrible waste.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She was a Warden now, simply by virtue of surviving the ritual, but she still didn’t feel like she belonged. She felt little in the way of kinship with Korren and Lythra so far, though they were of her people. In the Circle she had always felt so acutely elven—her pointed ears, large eyes, long nose, prominent forehead, and slight stature marking her as irrevocably different amongst the human mages. But now that she was with other elves she felt more a mage than an elf. Alistair, of course, had too much of the templar in him for her to ever think she could warm to him, and she knew so little of the dwarves that only time could tell.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And now Solomae was unconscious. She fought back a rising panic which whispered to her that Solomae wouldn’t wake, that though she had not yet choked on the blood and died clawing at her own throat, she would not recover, and they would never get the chance to become friends again. It couldn’t end like this. It couldn’t. It wasn’t fair that they should survive this far only for one to die in so stupid and pointless a manner.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She took Solomae’s hand and felt the faint flicker of a pulse beating steadily away. She looked to Lythra, the Dalish girl who seemed so old and solemn and wise beyond her years, with her intricate facial tattoos marking her devotion to Mythal. The Mother. Though Solomae was human she was held in Lythra’s lap like a child, and Nelmirea thought dully, </span>
  <em>
    <span>It should be me, I should be caring for her, I’m the only one here who loves her, who truly cares at all if she lives or dies.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’ll stay with her, if you’re needed somewhere else,” she said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No,” Lythra said, “you’re my responsibility. Our responsibility,” she corrected, glancing to Korren Tabris who crouched beside them. “We’re the junior Wardens and so we tend to the recruits.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Another thing Duncan said?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Alistair… but close enough.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Still holding Solomae’s hand, Nelmirea glanced back up to watch the others. Duncan was with the dwarves, still, and Alistair was tending to the bodies of the knights. He had spent all his time traveling south making friends with those two men, now he was cleaning up their corpses. She wondered if it bothered him, if the Joining kept on bothering the Grey Wardens after they had been witness to it enough times. Maybe that’s why only the junior wardens were forced to attend the Joining of new recruits, perhaps that’s why she hadn’t even met the other wardens yet.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae stirred, her fingers tightening around Nelmirea’s hand. Nelmirea let out a long breath of relief. Solomae’s blue eyes opened, blinking and squinting as she clutched at her head with her free hand and moaned.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Am I alive?” she asked, woozy. “Did I pass?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Barely, sleeping beauty,” Nelmirea told her, laughing to hide the tremble in her voice. “We’ve all been up and about for ages waiting for you to wake.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Really?” Solomae gulped, her face pale.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No,” said Lythra, unamused by Nelmirea’s exaggeration. “Mere minutes.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea realized that she was still clutching Solomae’s hand, and dropped it. She stood up.</span>
  <span><br/>
</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What now?” she asked Korren.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He shrugged. “That’s a question for Duncan.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It turned out that they would be allowed to rest awhile, while Alistair cleaned up after the Joining and Duncan made preparations for the upcoming fight against the darkspawn. He instructed them to return to the Grey Warden area of camp and rest until called upon again. Lythra and Korren accompanied them to the camp, and they sat in an uneasy circle.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae put her fingers to her temples and rubbed at them, then with a faint glow she channeled healing energies into herself and her face relaxed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Does it make it better?” Natia Brosca asked, looking a little suspicious as she watched the mage cast her spell.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes. Would you like me to help you?” Solomae asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Natia shook her head. “No, it’s nothing a little time and rest won’t heal.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’ve had worse hangovers from lichen ale,” declared Duran Aeducan, the redness in his eyes belying his bravado.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae raised one eyebrow and lifted a shoulder in acknowledgement. Then she turned to Nelmirea.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You were never any good at healing spells,” she said, and put her fingers on Nelmirea’s temples, silencing her protests. Healing magic flowed into Nelmirea’s mind, a cool soothing balm easing the swelling. Her eyes fluttered shut and she drew a sharp intake of breath.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It only lasted a moment, then Solomae dropped her hands to her sides and took a step back. She sat down on one of the logs by the fire and looked off into the night.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Did anyone die when you took your Joining?” she asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>At first neither Korren nor Lytha answered, though the question was obviously directed at them. Then Korren cleared his throat and said, “Yes. A man, Daveth. From Denerim, like me. A common cutpurse, but… not altogether a bad fellow. For a shem.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I don’t think I could have kept that a secret,” said Solomae. “Knowing what might happen.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You have to, now. You’re a warden, like us,” Korren told her. “The greater world can’t know the order’s secrets. The Chantry would frown on our use of blood magic.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I frown on the use of blood magic,” Solomae said, irritable. She clutched the corner of her sleeve in one hand. There was still blood on her clothes.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It doesn’t matter.” Lythra’s voice was dull, and she followed Solomae’s gaze out into the darkness beyond their fire, beyond the torches lighting the ruins of Ostagar. “The morality of it, the rightness or wrongness of it… the wardens don’t care about your feelings, or what you want, or what you think they should do. If you want to live, though, I suggest you follow Duncan’s orders and keep what you learned here tonight to yourselves.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Is that what you’re doing? Just trying to stay alive, no matter what lies you have to tell?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lythra smiled without it reaching her eyes. There were entirely too many teeth in her smile. “I don’t want to live,” she said. “I’m just giving you some friendly advice.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We lived,” said Duran, stoutly. “That’s what matters. No one’s truly a warden until they do what we did. It’s a proving, and a hard one, aye, but that’s why not everyone has what it takes to be a warden. Don’t trouble yourself with thoughts of the fallen.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae shook her head. “Maybe I don’t have what it takes.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You do,” Nelmiera spoke up, looking at her long and hard.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae’s lips curled into a smile, but it did not reach her eyes. “Do you ever get the feeling that you may be trapped in one long Harrowing?” she asked. “That you keep being tested and when you pass one test there’s another waiting round the corner?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea did not smile. “Every day.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eventually, Alistair returned, and he brought with him four amulets, explaining that it was a token of their Joining, a small amount of the elixir from the chalice hardened into a black facsimile of a gemstone and set into silver to remind them of this night. Nelmirea did not, particularly, want to remember this night. Except perhaps for the feel of Solomae’s fingers upon her temples and the cool relief of the magic tempering her headache.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae’s mouth twitched dangerously when Alistair said the amulets would help them remember the fallen, and Duran grunted, recognizing the irony. Nelmirea took hers without a word, slipping the cord over her head and tucking the amulet under the collar of her robes.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Not long before nightfall, now,” Alistair said, taking a seat beside Lythra. “Duncan’s meeting with the King. There’ll be a battle tonight, I’m sure of it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Good,” said Natia, gripping the handle on one of her small, deadly sharp daggers. “If fighting darkspawn is what we do from now on, best to get at it. I think I can feel them already, in the back of my mind. Like they’re out there, teaming about in the swamp, underground… just ready to swarm. I’ll give them a reason to run the opposite direction.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That’s the spirit,” said Alistair.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I could do with a fight,” agreed Lythra, fingering the fletching on one of her arrows.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“So could I,” Nelmirea said, realizing how true it was. She’d almost been happy out there, earlier, zapping the monsters. It was so much easier to fight an enemy you were allowed to hurt, so much more liberating to burn through them with magic than to worry always about keeping under control and beneath templar notice. If she was to feel that way every time the Wardens went into battle, the Joining was worth it, even if it hadn’t been a risk she had been given a choice in taking.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae was the only one who didn’t join in on the affirmations of eagerness for battle. She remained quiet and withdrawn, picking at the flecks of drying blood on her robes. She had the hands of a healer, not a battle mage, and she did not like to fail.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. Wardenmoot (Lothering)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>When the King’s army fell the fires burned bright long into the night.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea would barely remember it afterwards. She took a heavy blow to the back of her head and would have died but for Solomae’s fervent healing spells. But even with those spells, she was not herself for several days after.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>After fleeing the battle, they hid from the darkspawn in the night, retreating deeper into the swamp to stay clear of the ravaging horde. In the light of day they found their way back to a road and headed north.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The sun hurt her eyes. She became like the dwarves, afraid of the sky, as if she had not wished for the sun in those long years within the dim Circle Tower. She squinted in the light, aching, her head swimming, filled with the buzz of insects, tender fluttering thoughts darting to and fro.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She would have trouble recalling the details of their journey back north to Lothering. It was lost to her except in snatches. She remembered Solomae’s hand, the touch of her fingers on her temples as she whispered something, half healing words, half fretful muttering. Magic flowed from her palms in tendrils of blue light and flowered green behind Nelmirea’s eyes.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She remembered flames and she remembered running. She remembered screaming, not hers, but others lifting their voices to the Maker in supplication, or chanting battle cries, </span>
  <em>
    <span>in death, sacrifice</span>
  </em>
  <span>.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She only half remembered the travel, the days spent fleeing the wilds, and the night camped uneasily under the arch of a ruined highway, fitfully sleeping, being dragged from slumber periodically by Solomae, who held a water skin to her cracked lips and whispered healing spells into her ear.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She carried on full conversations that she would not remember an hour later.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They met a boy on the road, and at first she knew him, but then she forgot, and remembered again. Cousland. One of the twins, the one who liked swords, not the pretty petty pattering girl with the keys to the ledger… what was the boy’s name? Aedan Cousland. She had met him scant weeks ago, had traveled south with his brother Fergus’s army, yes, she remembered that.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He had come south in search of his brother, bringing news that Highever had fallen and the Teyrn slain. But when they met him on the road and told him of the disaster at Ostagar, the hopelessness of those in the vanguard surviving, he turned back with them to Lothering. His sister was there, taking refuge in the village Chantry, and now that he was convinced Fergus had fallen, she was the only other Cousland left alive.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Never in all her wildest dreams would Nelmira Surana have imagined that one day she and the Cousland twins would all be refugees and outlaws together. Certainly not when she was a child and they were just names to her, the rich noble family that employed her parents, the epitome of all that was unattainable and privileged about being human instead of elven, mundane instead of magical. But once they were all gathered in Lothering together, hiding out in the Chantry wondering what to do next, she realized that they were on equal footing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was not solid footing. The Couslands had fallen farther than she had risen. They were orphaned and homeless, their titles worth very little to them now, and they were wanted dead by Arl Rendon Howe. Meanwhile, Nelmirea and her Grey Warden companions were without a leader or a purpose, and were wanted dead by Teryn Loghain Mac Tir, the new Regent of Ferelden.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Their only consolation was that the darkspawn were coming for them all, the rich and the powerful and the weak, the mighty and the pathetic, alike. Mac Tir labeled the Grey Wardens traitors and lay the blame for Cailan’s death upon their heads, if the wanted posters and the gossiping townsfolk of Lothering were to be believed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was like the Circle all over again; Gregoir declaring Nelmirea and Solomae guilty of blood magic or tainted by association. Was she destined to become a scapegoat for every wrong? She wanted to scream to the uncaring, too bright heavens that it was not fair. The Wardens were supposed to be her salvation, her chance at freedom and a life of purpose, not just another disaster beyond her control.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Before the darkspawn arrived, more Warden survivors rolled in from Ostagar. This time it was Duncan’s protégé, Alistair, along with his mabari hound, the Dalish girl Lythra, and someone Nelmirea was quite sure she had not met before.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Morrigan was an eccentrically dressed young woman of indeterminate years, (could be anywhere from twenty to thirty if Nelmirea had to hazard a guess), and she had a haughty, uncaring look about her. She wore a raggedly leather skirt with pants underneath it, and large black boots, and her tunic was a deep purple with a fur trimmed hood. Bird feathers decorated one sleeve, and a gaudy multi-layered necklace rounded out the look.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea found her appearance captivating, though the woman did not seem to return the sentiment, her eyes barely skittering over Nelmirea in her blue robes upon introduction. She carried a large gnarled stick that was unmistakably a mage’s staff. So, an apostate. Well, at least there were a lot of them, now. They might all be fugitives with targets painted on their backs, but it was no longer just Nelmirea against the world. It wasn’t even just Nelmirea and Solomae against the world.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“So,” said Morrigan, looking Solomae up and down appraisingly and barely sparing a flicker of a glance for Nelmirea, “You are Circle bred mages, are you? I must admit I am curious. I have not had a chance to associate with your kind before. Oh, Mother told me stories of the mages who allow themselves to be leashed and neutered like cattle by the templars of the Chantry, but I did not expect to meet any out and about in the world. I certainly never intended to get near enough to a Circle to spy you there.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We’re not Circle mages anymore,” said Nelmirea, a touch defensively. She didn’t know what she’d done to provoke such spiteful words from the apostate. It wasn’t as if she’d said “I’ve never met a dirty bog hag before” straight away after meeting her. And Solomae had been the picture of politeness.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No, of course, you are Grey Wardens,” Morrigan agreed. “But you were raised in the Circle, were you not?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes,” said Solomae. Her voice was mild, but there was a touch of frostiness in her eyes as she returned Morrigan’s appraising look with one of her own. “From the age of ten to twenty; half my life.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That tis not so very long. You are lucky to be free while you are still so young,” Morrigan said, with the archness of someone much older than she looked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“And how old are you?” Nelmirea asked, unable to reign in her curiosity. “And did you spend your whole life in the Wilds? That must be its own kind of confinement.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh, I am somewhat older than twenty, but no more than five and twenty, I should think,” said Morrigan. “Flemeth never was one for marking such trivial things as birthdays. But I have spent all of those years in the Wilds with my mother, yes. Tis not ‘confinement’ though. I was free to venture out on my own, and did so many times, though I always returned before long.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Afraid of being caught by the templars?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No,” Morrigan denied sharply. “Only I find human settlements so very… odd. So many villages like this one, all of them the same, all of them so dull and yet so full self-importance.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Most self important people turn out to be dull in the end,” Nelmirea commented</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Have you ever been to a city? Gwaren, or Denerim, or Highever?” questioned Solomae.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No, I have seldom ventured that far from the Wilds. I went to Redcliffe once, years ago, but did not find it impressive. There are Tevinter ruins deep in the swamp that put Redcliffe Castle to shame.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Solomae hails from Kirkwall,” Nelmirea said, voluteering the information though Solomae frowned at her. “It’s a city state far to the way north across the Waking Sea, an ancient port dating back to the heyday of the Imperium. And I spent my childhood in Highever, in the shadow of the Cousland’s castle, which is quite a bit larger than Redcliffe, or so I hear. It seems that for Circle mages who were corralled like cattle, we’ve seen more of the world than you have, hidden away in your swamp.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Morrigan surprised her by smiling at that. “Fair enough,” she said, amusement tinging her voice in a sing-song manner and light dancing behind her golden eyes. “Perhaps you shall have wisdom to impart on me, learnt from all your worldly travels.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmiera knew when she was being mocked. Ancestors knew she’d been mocked enough in the Tower for her curious elven ways, which she had stamped out over the years. But Morrigan was not laughing silently at her for using strange elvhen words or having pointy ears, but for boasting about her proximity to Highever castle. And perhaps she deserved it for such foolishness.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Her head was feeling better after Solomae’s constant healing spells and some sleep, but talking to Morrigan made the dull ache come back. It made her mad that she did indeed sound stupid, talking about Kirkwall like she’d ever been there, like it mattered. Morrigan was right. Half her life, as well as Solomae’s, had been spent in a cage. Nelmirea would have given anything to have been raised alone in a swamp by her mother.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She thought of Iossa Surana’s rough hands and soft voice, of singing elvish songs together as they picked elfroot and lavender in the fields outside the alienage walls, and she imagined doing that every day for the past ten years. Every day. She envied Morrigan, even if it seemed as if the apostate hadn’t had any friends her own age growing up. Nelmirea thought of Jowan, of Solomae, and wondered if “friends” were the cruelest tormenters of all.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It wasn’t all bad, though. Solomae had saved her life at Ostagar and cared for her all the way on the road to Lothering. She was a healer at heart, and Nelmirea’s injury had been so bad she had become the center of Solomae’s world for a few days. She could not deny that she liked how that felt, despite the unpleasantness of the near death experience and the lasting disorientation of the cracked head. She was starting to miss it, a little, now that she was doing better.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But she was not so much of a self-indulgent child that she’d go on pretending to feel worse than she did just for the attention. While still in Lothering she told Solomae that she felt good as new. As if it had never even happened. There was still a faint buzzing in her ears, like a never-ending high pitched whine, but that too would fade in time. She hoped.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The rag tag group of Grey Wardens and the allies they’d attracted would soon leave Lothering behind, trying to stay ahead of the darkspawn invasion.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Alistair thought their best bet was travel to Redcliffe and to appeal to Arl Eamon Guerrin for help against Loghain before they went about trying to use the Ancient Treaties to rebuild an army.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>May the gods help them all, but Alistair was the closest thing to a leader they had at the moment. He’d been a Grey Warden longer than the rest and been at Duncan’s side when the Commander had recruited most of them, so even though he hemmed and hawed and protested a great deal, they held a vote and after much debate, decided that if anyone asked who was in charge, they’d say it was him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was not an altogether unanimous decision.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They were camped in a field outside Lothering the night after they’d all reunited in the village, and were seated in a circle around the campfire. The conversation was very serious, starting with debate about whether to go to Denerim and challenge Loghain, go to Redcliffe and seek out Arl Eamon, or try to ignore the political strife altogether and use the Ancient Treaties to recruit the mages, dwarves, and Dalish elves to their cause. When no one could agree on that, the debate turned to who exactly should be making the decisions about where they went and what they did.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Duran Aeducan, the dwarven prince from Orzammar, had put himself forward and said that he knew more about leadership than anyone present. Maybe it was because he was a dwarf and they were prejudiced, or maybe it was because he was altogether too eager to put himself in charge of everyone else, or maybe it was because Natia Brosca told them all that he’d been exiled from Orzammar for killing his brother, but no one raised their hand for him besides Sten.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Alistair said that Lythra Mahariel should lead them, though he didn’t really say why, just that he thought she’d make a good commander. Nelmirea thought it apparent that he had a crush on her, but she cast her vote for Lythra as well. The Dalish girl frightened her a little and that seemed as good a reason to put her in charge as any. Also, Nelmirea just liked the idea of an elf in charge of them all.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lythra was stoic and quiet, carrying herself with an air of power that Nelmirea had never seen in an elf before. That might just be how all the Dalish were, but Lythra was uncommonly young to be so serious and severe; she was no older than Nelmirea, but she gave off an aura of someone who had lived far longer. As if keeping the spirit of the Ancient Elves alive deep in the wilderness of the Brecilian Forest gave her wisdom beyond the rest of them…. Or maybe that was all nonsense, maybe Nelmirea was allowing the stories her mother had told her about the Dalish to run away with her. Maybe Alistair wasn’t the only one with a bit of a crush on Lythra Mahariel.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea pushed that thought of her mind, as she had always pushed such thoughts away.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>At any rate, Morrigan also voted to put Lythra in charge, and Lythra had looked between the three of them with a frown and said, “No. I don’t want to lead the Grey Wardens. I never even wanted to be a Grey Warden. I don’t care how many of you vote for me, you can’t force me to be your ‘leader’ the way Duncan forced me to join. It doesn’t work that way.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She voted to make Alistair their leader, as if in revenge for his nominating her. Natia Brosca also voted for Alistair, but Korren Tabris voted for Lythra.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The people who were traveling with the Wardens but were not officially Grey Wardens got to vote, though none of them were up for the role of the Commander. The one thing they could all agree on was that the leader of the Grey Wardens should be someone who had at least undergone the Joining.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Aeden and Elissa Cousland both voted for Alistair, as did Leliana, the bow-wielding Chantry laysister who said she’d been given a directive from the Maker himself to accompany the Wardens.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>That left Sten, the Qunari warrior who had been freed from a cage at the behest of the Couslands and Leliana. He’d been sentenced to a gruesome death by the Revered Mother, punishment for slaughtering a family of farmers days ago. If they hadn’t intervened he would have been left to starve to death or murdered by darkspawn.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He looked around with a stony expression and said, “I do not think any of you are deserving of command over an army.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Does that mean you abstain?” Aedan asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No you are not abstaining or no you’re not voting?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I told you when you released me from my cage that I would help in the struggle against the Blight,” said Sten, grinding out the words slowly as if talking to an idiot child. “I gave you my word that I would follow you so long as you maintained that path.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m not a Grey Warden so you can’t vote for me.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Then we are at an impasse.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Aedan sighed heavily. “Can we just count that as a vote for Alistair? If Sten is following me and I’m voting for Alistair then he’s following my lead and voting for Alistair.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Stone’s sake,” grumbled Duran, “I’m the only one whio actually wants to lead the Wardens and you’re all sitting on your thumbs debating between two people who would rather point fingers at the other one than take any responsibility.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He glared at Lythra and Alistair, who were the only two that had gotten any votes so far despite their dismay at even being nominated.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Very well,” said Sten, “if I must vote I will vote for Duran Aeducan. He does not have any experience as a warrior but he is willing to lead. If he fails he will die and we will choose another.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Duran spluttered a little at that, but it got him one vote beside his own.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“So that’s… five votes for Alistair, four votes for Lythra, two votes for Duran. Did everyone vote?” asked Aedan looking around. His searching eyes landed on Solomae and he raised his eyebrows, saying her name as a question.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae was silent for a moment, suddenly shy under the scrutiny of everyone following Aedan’s lead to look at her. “I vote for Lythra, but I also think that those of us who are Grey Wardens should get two votes and the others should get one. That way there won’t be a tie.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Her suggestion was followed by thoughtful silence as the others tried to quickly do the math in their heads, but Solomae only paused a moment before elaborating, “That would give Lythra nine votes, Alistair six votes, and Duran three votes. A clear majority.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I like the way she thinks,” said Alistair, a touch too cheerfully. There was something decidedly unmanly, Nelmirea decided, about him being so happy to not have to assume any responsibility. It made her more confident in her vote for Lythra, and proud of Solomae for tipping the scales.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But Lythra wasn’t having any of it. She stood up. “Did none of you hear what I said earlier? I’m not your leader, and I don’t care what math you do to make it so. I said what I said. Alistair is determined to fight against the Blight and honor Duncan’s memory, so he might blush and stammer about not wanting to be a leader, but he’ll do it. You know that he will, I know he will, and he knows that he will. But if you try to pin this on me I’m just going to walk away. And I’ve got an arrow for the eye of anyone who tells me otherwise.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She gazed defiantly around the campfire at all of them, then uttered a curse in elvhen and stalked away into the darkness.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“She’s got backbone and I can tell you admire that,” said Duran, filling the awkward silence that remained. “But it takes more than a loud bark to be a leader. If those of you who voted for her want to change your vote to me, I can promise you I’ve got the backbone </span>
  <em>
    <span>and</span>
  </em>
  <span> the willingness to lead. I won’t walk away from it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’d consider it,” said Korren, “if you told me that your brother deserved the knife in the back.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea half expected a fight to break out—for Duran to challenge him to a duel or something equally as dramatic. The dwarven prince was silent for a long uncomfortable stretch of time that seemed to go on forever, but then he finally said, “No. He didn’t.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Well,” said Aedan quietly into the silence that followed this admission, “should we all vote again? Alistair, unless you’ve got a dark secret you need to tell us about. A brother you killed?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He chuckled as he said this, which Nelmirea found rather distasteful. She didn’t much like Aedan from what little she knew of him after the short time she had spent in his company at Highever and now in Lothering. She knew she was biased against the Couslands, always had been and always would be, but she disliked how Aedan seemed to be directing the night’s debate despite not even being a Warden. She got the feeling that even though he wasn’t in the running to be the leader, he would be the one doing all the leading.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You’re all idiots to even think of putting me in charge,” said Alistair, but he didn’t sound angry or irritated the way Lythra had been. Just a little embarrassed and nervous at all the attention. “But no, I didn’t kill my brother. Even if the whole country believes I was in on some conspiracy with Duncan to do it and I’m wanted for treason because of it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I knew it!” exclaimed Elissa suddenly, and she seized her brother’s arm as she said it. “He looks just like him. I knew it wasn’t a coincidence.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The outburst startled Nelmirea, and she could tell she wasn’t the only one. Elissa had been very quiet thus far, not joining in on the debate, and when she had cast her vote for Alistair it had seemed like an echo of Aedan’s vote. Even now it was Aedan’s arm she shook, as if she and her brother had had a private debate about this before and she was delighted to have scored a victory against her sibling.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Knew what? And hold up…” Korren said, the wheels turning in his head. His eyes narrowed as he looked more closely at Alistair. “Does that mean…”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Alistair sighed. “Curse my big mouth,” he said. “And I’d been so good at keeping quiet about it before…”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“King Cailan was your brother?” Solomae asked, speaking what was at the forefront of everyone’s mind.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes, yes,” said Alistair uncomfortably, and then he rambled out in one run on sentence, “I’m a bastard and my father was King Maric and I was raised by Arl Eamon until I was sent away to the Chantry to become a Templar but then Duncan recruited me to the Grey Wardens and now I’m here. There—you lot know my entire life story now.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Why didn’t you tell us this sooner?” Aedan asked. “This is incredibly important information.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Alistair made a sour face. “I fail to see how.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Now that King Cailan is dead you’re the heir to the throne.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Maker’s breath, Cousland. You’re a noble; you know how these things work. My mother was a commoner, I’m a commoner, the throne has never been in my future. Anyway I’m sorry I even mentioned that Cailan was my brother. It has absolutely no bearing on anything.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It might feed into Loghain’s story that the Wardens orchestrated King Cailan’s death, actually,” said Duran, stroking his beard. “Did Duncan know this about you?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes, actually… but he was the only Warden who knew, since it doesn’t matter, and all.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hm, well, Duncan singled you out from the templars, mentored you, clearly favored you over the other Wardens,” Duran said, nodding to himself thoughtfully. “You can see how Loghain might use that against you. Might say Duncan was setting it up for you to be safe away from the battlefield, at the Tower of Ishal, while the King was tricked into going into battle against the darkspawn horde.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Except Loghain’s the one who quit the battlefield and left Cailan to die,” said Alistair, angry now. His wry smiles self-effacing stammering mannerisms vanished completely. His face darkened and Nelmirea was suddenly quite sure that if Loghain Mac Tir were standing there before them, Alistair would stab him through the heart without a second thought.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Easy,” said Duran, holding one hand up. “Everyone here knows what Loghain did was treachery. We were all there at Ostagar. Well, all us Wardens were there. I’m just saying, this is going to matter, mark my words. If Loghain knows you’re the old king’s bastard he’ll use that against you, against us.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“As if he needed more lies to slander the Wardens,” said Solomae bitterly. “There’s no mention of Alistair being the King’s brother in the bounty out on us now.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Give it time. That is, if Loghain knows.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Alistair shrugged. “I suppose he must. He was my father’s closest friend, they say. I don’t know. I never gave it much thought before. I never gave Loghain much thought before.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We all have to give Loghain a lot of thought now,” said Aedan. “But I disagree with Duran about it being a liability. Loghain has proclaimed himself King, or Regent at least, based on Anora’s claim to the throne. He’s stolen the throne, really, and soon everyone will know what we know: that he and Rendon Howe are in league together to destroy the Cousland and Theirin bloodlines so that they can rise to power. We just have to get the truth out there. Alistair and Duncan didn’t conspire to kill the King, it was Loghain and Howe all along. Howe withheld his troops from the battle entirely, choosing instead to stage a coup against my family and station his forces at Highever castle. Loghain withdrew from the battlefield. He won’t be able to convince people that the Grey Warden were somehow the masterminds behind the slaughter when it becomes apparent that only about half dozen of you survived. And if he tries to vilify Alistair for all this, well,” Aedan paused with a scoff, “it will become even more apparent that he is just afraid of the legitimacy of Alistair’s blood claim to the throne over his own.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea found herself nodding slowly. As much as she instinctively didn’t like Aedan Cousland, she found herself agreeing with what he said. About Loghain and the Wardens, at least.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Alistair seemed less convinced by the speech. “Except I’m not going to make a claim for the throne.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Aedan waved his hand. “That’s a conversation for later. When we go to Redcliffe and talk to Arl Eamon we can discuss what to do about Loghain, and Howe, and the throne. Right now we’re deciding who to name Commander of the Grey in Duncan’s stead.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I don’t think we need to make that decision at all, actually,” Alistair said. “Look, you can vote about who should be the leader or you can vote about what to do. Take a vote to decide where we go next.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Sten spoke up again, “That is a bad strategy. Do all your armies put every decision to a vote? There must always be leaders. Generals. Commanders. Those who are entrusted to make important decisions when there is no time for discussion and debate.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We’re not an army yet, there’s a dozen people here.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You are seeking to build an army. How will you recruit anyone without a leader? No. You must choose. If none of you can agree, I will lead you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No, you won’t,” Alistair shot back, surprisingly decisive.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m sorry, Sten, but Ferelden isn’t going to unite behind a Qunari,” Aedan said, his tone less peevish, but just as firm. “No one here doubts your skill as a warrior, it's just… well… you’re not Fereldan.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Sten regarded them with the same inscrutable expression he wore at all times, and said, “I do not understand. You have humans, elves, and dwarves among you. Would the humans of your land unite behind an elf, or a dwarf? Would the dwarves of Orzammar or elves of the Dales agree to follow any but their own into battle? But what truly perplexes me is that you would have nominated a woman to lead you. Would your people unite behind a woman?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh dear goddesses,” interjected Morrigan. “When will this tedious discussion end? I should think an easier way to decide would be for each of you to take out your manhood for measurement, and the one with the most impressive member gets to lead us womenfolk to our deaths at the hands of the darkspawn.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“If we did that Sten would definitely win,” said Alistair without a hitch, and at her bemused look he insisted, “What? Come on, don’t tell me you weren’t thinking it. Look at him.” He made a vague up and down gesture in Sten’s direction, illustrating the impressive size of the Qunari.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea let out a nervous giggle, and it was the worst time to finally laugh at one of Alistair’s jokes, because Sten turned his terrifying gaze upon her for one dreadful moment. She didn’t know why she’d laughed. Morrigan and Alistair’s ribald conversation was not amusing, really, just… uncomfortable to be around.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae nudged her arm as if in reprimand or warning, but it was a belated gesture. Nelmirea simply nudged her back, a little more forcefully, and Sten’s frown deepened as he watched them jostle while they stared forward with innocently bland expressions on their faces.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I do not see the point of this,” Sten intoned, turning away to look back at Morrigan. “Do Fereldans often judge a person’s worth by the size of their genitals? Is this a human custom, or do dwarves and elves also subscribe to this practice?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We are all doomed,” sighed Morrigan, brushing her loose bangs back from her face in a sweepingly over dramatic gesture.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It was sarcasm,” Duran told Sten, taking pity on him. “She was being sarcastic. And Alistair is always like that. Ignore them.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I do not understand why this is considered sarcasm or humor. I believe it is a fair assumption to make, as I am larger than the rest of you in all other ways. It is understandable and likely accurate to assume that—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Let’s get back on topic,” said Aedan with the long suffering sigh of one who considers himself to be the only adult present. “Sten, it’s like I said before. You’re not Fereldan. Even though we’re different races everyone else here is Fereldan. Well, maybe not Leliana…”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I </span>
  <em>
    <span>am</span>
  </em>
  <span> Fereldan,” Leliana objected, despite her pronounced Orlesian accent.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Your people do not tolerate foreigners,” said Sten, ignoring her completely. “You have made this clear. I am learning much about Ferelden. Thank you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Korren said, “Can we just vote? I’m definitely not voting for Alistair, now, so I suppose I will change mine to Duran. It’s nothing personal, shem.” He gave a stiff nod to Alistair. “But your noble family never did anything for the elves of the Denerim alienage. Didn’t matter if Maric or Cailan was the King; nothing ever got better for us after the war with Orlais was over. It’s still a death sentence for any elf to raise a hand against a human or carry weapons, even in self-defense. We’re starved, beaten, raped, and killed under the banner of the Theirin kings just like we were under the Orlesians.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Well,” said Alistair slowly, “no offense taken, I guess. Not that I want you to vote for me or anything, but I don’t consider myself a Theirin. That part of me just… well it never did me any good, either.” He shrugged and looked away. “I’d like to just be a Grey Warden, same as the rest of you. I’m no Theirin Prince, not really.” He shuddered.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That’s a nice thought, but now that I see the King in your face all I can think of is those damned portraits Cailan spread around. We lived in squalor with his velvet portrait hanging up at the general store. When there wasn’t food or other goods on the shelves there was Cailan on the wall.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea thought back to her childhood in the Highever alienage. It had been a happier time for her, before the Circle, but the poverty and fear of violence had always been at the edges. It had touched her even then, in her parents’ long gruelling days away from home, the way she and all the other children were left to fend for themselves when Mama Ghil’ana couldn’t handle them all, and the constant warnings to stay away from humans and never look them in the eyes. She wondered what kind of things Korren had experienced in Denerim to make him so angry.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He wasn’t done talking. Korren shook his head and went on, “You know, I met him at Ostagar and I told him straight out what I’d done to get conscripted into the Wardens, how I’d killed a nobleman and Duncan had to claim me for the Wardens to keep me from being executed. Do you know what he said?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What did he say?” Alistair asked, a weary tone to his cooperative response.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Nothing, really. It just rolled off his back, like water off a duck. He uttered some empty thing, how the Wardens would benefit from such a fierce warrior in their ranks. I wasn’t sure he’d even heard what I’d said. Too wrapped up in his plans for his glorious victory against the darkspawn.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Aedan cleared his throat and said, “Some say that King Cailan did not truly rule, that it was Anora Mac Tir, his Queen, who ruled Ferelden from behind the throne.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“So?” Korren shot back. “Should that make me honor his memory? Should I respect him for his dereliction of duty, for not serving the needs of his elven people or paying attention to our suffering? For not granting us the full rights of citizenship?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Aedan looked truly flustered for the first time. “No, I meant… well I just meant… look, Loghain is Anora’s father and the two of them have control of the throne now. Do you think they will suddenly start to care for the elves?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I never said I had any love for the Mac Tirs,” said Korren, waving one hand dismissively. “I have no love for any noble shem, you included, Cousland. That’s why my vote for the new Warden Commander goes to Duran, not to Alistair… or you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Fair enough,” said Alistair, pointedly, as if to tell Aedan to let it go.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Aedan just nodded silently. “Well, my vote is still the same. Anyone else care to weigh in?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m voting for Alistair,” said Nelmirea, which awarded her a look of surprise from the former templar. She returned his look with a shrug. He didn’t really need to know why she did what she did.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She wasn’t going to vote for Duran, a royal prince who had killed his own brother and didn’t even have anything to say in his own defense. Maybe it was unfair to judge him, as she had been judged a maleficar and thrown out of the Circle, but still. He hadn’t defended himself, had not even tried to claim that his fratricide was justified.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae eyed Nelmirea and said softly, “I’ll also vote for Alistair.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh very well,” Morrigan sighed. “I cannot believe I am saying this, but I will also vote for the resident idiot to be our leader. But I am only doing so in deference to Cousland’s vote of confidence.” She threw an arch look Aedan’s way, and the young noble smiled back at her. There was something going on there, Nelmiera thought, or there soon would be.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Once all the votes were recounted, it came out in favor of Alistair.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Sten, Korren, Alistair and Duran himself were the only ones to vote for Duran.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Well,” Alistair said, throwing up his hands once it was apparent he had been chosen and could not wriggle out of it, “I’m not going to walk away from the Grey Wardens. Lythra’s right about that at least. So if you’re going to make me lead… Maker, you’re going to regret it. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. Anyway, my first ruling as your Commander is that you all have to vote on where we go from here.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>This was met with loud groans all around. “Fine,” he relented. “Redcliffe? Yes, Redcliffe. We’ll go to Arl Eamon first. And don’t complain about it if you don’t like it because I gave you every chance to stop me from making the decision.” Aedan gave him an encouraging nod when he looked his way. “Arl Eamon will know what to do from there.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>At first light the night morning they left Lothering, heading north on the Imperial Highway. Nelmiera noticed that they fell into separate, smaller groups, and she observed the dynamics quietly, the same way she had often observed the dynamics of the other mage apprentices back at the Circle.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Korren Tabris stuck close to Lythra Mahariel, possibly because of elven solidarity and possibly because they’d had their Joining together prior to the others, and had been the only two to survive. Alistair seemed to want to walk with Lythra Mahariel, but there was some awkwardness there, either because Korren was so sour on human nobles or some other reason Nelmirea wasn’t aware of.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Aedan split his time and conversation between Alistair and Morrigan, floating between them throughout the day’s hike. Nelmirea decided that Aedan was someone to watch closely, as he had maneuvered himself into a position of leadership by proxy. His interest in Alistair’s friendship was likely motivated by wanting to direct their newly elected Warden Commander’s decisions, and Alistair seemed eager to have someone to follow, so he was happy to lend an ear to whatever Aedan had to say. Aedan’s interest in Morrigan was something else altogether, and Nelmirea though it obvious that he found the swamp witch attractive and alluring.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Duran had much the same idea as Aedan with regard to Alistair. If he had not been named the leader, he would at least put himself near the man who had been, and try to influence him. Natia Brosca was a harder person to get a read on. She had pretty much destroyed Duran’s chances of being elected as Commander by telling people about his past transgressions in Orzammar, and had voted against him herself, but she still hung around the other dwarf almost exclusively.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Elissa Cousland was utterly uninteresting, just as Nelmirea had found her when they’d visited Highever castle. She stuck close to Leliana for the most part, and Nelmirea didn’t think there was much that could be worth paying attention to between those two. She had nothing against Leliana, per se, except of course that she was a devotee of the Andrastan faith, a Chantry laysister who had been living at the Lothering chapel. Perhaps it was unfair, but she reminded Nelmirea of Lily every time she looked at her. Not that they were physically very similar… but memories of Lily praying in the Kinloch Hold chapel were fresh in her mind. At any rate, Leliana’s constant references to the Maker and Blessed Andraste really turned her off.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Sten mostly only conversed with the two mabari hounds, Barkspawn and Calenhad. He was taciturn and standoffish towards the others.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“So, have you figured everyone out yet?” Solomae asked her around midday. Nelmirea jumped, a little startled and embarrassed that she’d been so obvious.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What?” she asked, trying to sound innocent and clueless.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I know that look. You’ve been studying our companions more closely than you ever read a single book,” Solomae said, but there was laughter in her voice.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I am not.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Uh huh. Well, keep your conclusions to yourself, if you must. I’m glad you’re feeling better anyway. You </span>
  <em>
    <span>are</span>
  </em>
  <span> feeling better, aren’t you?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Come to think of it, Nelmirea had forgotten to even notice the ringing in her ears all day. “Yes, much better. Thank you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Don’t thank me, Nelly.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You saved my life.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Well of course I did.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea smiled quietly to herself, looking away to hide the grin. Things were starting to feel better, despite how dire their circumstances truly were.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>On the surface there was little reason for rejoicing. They were a small band of fugitives who could barely function well enough to choose a leader, and had settled on a bastard boy no more qualified to command an army than he was to become a king. And they were somehow the only ones who could fight against the Blight, a phenomenon that only occurred every few centuries. How unlucky that it should be visited upon the world now, during Nelmirea’s lifetime.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But despite all that, things were starting to feel normal again when it came to Solomae. They could talk, and smile, and be easy around each other once more. The politics and betrayals of the Circle were behind them, part of a different life. They were truly Grey Wardens now, not just recruits, not just fledgling members. They had gone through the fires of the Joining and of Ostagar, and it cleansed them of their troubles without either having to say a word.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Now they watched out for each other, cared for each other, and were of the same mind. Or, well, at least they had been of the same mind last night, Solomae had followed her lead when it came to voting around the campfire. Nelmirea was sure that this was a sign they were back to being a team.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It had taken weeks, it had taken nearly dying more than once, but finally Jowan and the Circle was behind them.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0011"><h2>11. With the Wardens (Lothering)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>The first time they passed through Lothering, they were heading south towards Ostagar. Before the Joining, before the battle, before the Blight seemed true and real.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae had slipped out of camp. It had been easy, then. Alistair, for all his talk about owing it to Duncan to see the recruits safely delivered to Ostagar, was not a very attentive warden. There was no one to watch them in the night, not like the Circle and its ever vigilant templars with their rotating shifts. Nelmirea had been avoiding her, and she had been avoiding Nelmirea, so when she excused herself to her tent in the early evening no one was aware that she snuck out the other side.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She did not slip away with the intent to desert the Wardens. She knew that to do so would mean wandering the world as an apostate with no protection. She did not want that.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>At times she had toyed with the idea of running away to Orlais or the Free Marches, throwing herself upon the mercy of the Circles there, pretending she was not Solomae Amell, reject of Kinloch Hold, but an apostate who had been raised in secret by parents who had not wanted her taken to a circle. She invented a story that was not so far from the life her father had intended for her—kept apart from others, taught to hide and suppress her magic, not allowed to be herself.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But this fantasy fell short when she imagined their reaction. Even if she lay the blame on her parents, the templars and circle mages would be wary of her. It would also be difficult to pretend she had not undergone a formal Circle education for the past ten years. She did not know if she could be convincingly ignorant enough. She did not know if she could lie that well.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Near Lothering, she left the Warden camp to find the farm outside town where her mother’s cousin Leandra had once lived. She did not know if the Hawkes still resided there, but she remembered them from when she had been a child in Crestwood. Lothering was a few day’s ride south from Crestwood, and they had visited once or twice. But not often.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Father had been cautious about mingling with other transplants from home, especially family. Leandra had married an apostate, they had run away from Kirkwall together, and it had been a great scandal. Almost as much of a scandal as Daylen developing magic and Revka disappearing, consumed by her grief over losing her first born son to the Gallows.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Even though no one in the south of Ferelden knew these details about the Amells and the Hawkes, it would not do to draw too much attention to themselves.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae did not think it likely that they would still live in the same place as ten years past. They probably had kept on the move to keep ahead of the templars. But she felt a curiosity she could not shake, and a small voice telling her that maybe, if they were there, Leandra and Malcolm would have news of her father, would know where he had gone after the templars took away all of his children.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>(After she had betrayed him. After she had told the terrible truth.)</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She had to go into Lothering, to the inn, to ask for directions to the Hawke family farm. Ten years had gone by and though she could vaguely recall the way the farm looked, the small house, the lane leading up to it, there was no way she could have found it in the night so many years later. So rather than wander from homestead to homestead, she took her chances talking to villagers.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was not easy to work up the courage. She still felt an instinctual fear of being around the smallfolk of Ferelden. She’d lived in abject terror of her neighbors in Crestwood, as a child, and for the past ten years had soothed herself with the thought that life within the Circle was far better than life outside, surrounded by the fearful and ignorant peasants with their torches and pitchforks. But she was a Grey Warden now, and if anyone questioned her… well, what would she do? She almost wished she had Alistair there, a Grey Warden and a templar to boot, to vouch for her and make the villagers less hostile… but no, she had to stop thinking like that. If she was on Warden business, that would be one thing, but on a private matter, one that she had not asked leave to undertake…? She was on her own. No one out here would watch over her, or protect her, not even a former templar. She had to watch out for herself, speak for herself, and deal with people herself.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She was lucky. The innkeeper knew the Hawkes. They still lived just outside Lothering, and so the man sketched her a rudimentary map to help her find the homestead. He mercifully asked few questions, readily accepting the truth that she was family visiting from the north, and saying that aye, she was the spitting image of young Bethany, Leandra’s youngest daughter. He made a pointed comment about how a pretty young lady like herself ought not to be out traveling alone in the dark, but he seemed more interested in selling her a room for 10 coppers than her actual safety. When she declined and said she was eager to get to her cousins’ house that night, he simply shrugged and wished her well.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The moon was still low in the sky when she reached her destination. There were lights shining from the cottage windows. She took a deep breath and knocked, reminding herself that she had nothing to fear from the Hawkes, for they were family.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A cascade of loud barking came from within the house. Soon there was the sound of claws scrabbling at the door and a woman’s voice saying, “Hush, calm down Bruiser, let me get by. Murderers seldom knock, don’t you think?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A young woman with a mop of short black hair and piercing blue eyes opened the door. She scanned Solomae with a frank stare, a quirk of an eyebrow, and a saucy tilt to the corner of her mouth. She was just taking a breath to say something when another voice called out, “Marian, who is it? Who could be here so late at night?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hello,” said Solomae, as polite and quiet as she could possibly be. “It’s Solomae.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She didn’t know if Marian would remember her, but she remembered Marian. She was about Daylen’s age, a little older than Solomae. The second of Leandra’s four children.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Leandra appeared beside her before she could respond. Solomae assumed it was Leandra, anyway. The older woman gaped in surprise for a moment, then exclaimed, “Can it really be? You look like her… but Solomae went off to the Circle years ago…”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes, I did, but I’m out again,” said Solomae, making it sound like an easy thing. “May I come in?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Marian put out a hand, quick as a dart, but then leaned her whole body across the doorway with a deceptive loucheness. “Oh sure,” she said, “long lost cousin Solomae showing up out of nowhere, in the middle of the night, all alone? That’s not weird.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s a little weird,” said Solomae, evenly. “It’s hardly the middle of the night, though. By the smell of things you’re only just eating dinner.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Marian snorted appreciatively, but the suspicion in her eyes did not go away. Leandra batted at her arm, trying to push her out of the way. “Let her in, Marian. Goodness.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Are you alone?” Marian asked, not budging.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes, I did not bring a cadre of templars to drag your father away, if that’s what you’re asking,” Solomae said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Embarrassing for you if you did,” Marian said with another snort, this time less appreciative. “My father died three years ago.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m sorry,” Solomae said, softly. “Still, no templars. I’m not with the Circle anymore. I’m a Grey Warden now. Or, I soon will be.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Marian shifted from the doorframe, but instead of going back inside, she slipped out into the lane. She slunk past Solomae, close enough to whisper in her ear, “Well we’ll just have a look around, </span>
  <em>
    <span>cousin,” </span>
  </em>
  <span>before vanishing into the night.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae blinked, confused about what had just happened, but Leandra pulled her inside eagerly. “Oh, don’t mind her, she sees templars in the rafters, like bats. She’ll be back after she’s patrolled the woods and upturned the haybales to her satisfaction. But tell me, how are you? What has happened? Are you alright? Maker’s breath, but you have grown, you are a woman now, just look at you! The spitting image of Revka, at that age.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m with the Wardens now,” Solomae repeated, letting herself be led inside to the warmth of the cottage. The dog that had been barking earlier was waiting inside to sniff her up and down. She looked at it warily. It was a great big mabari hound in a studded collar, but it had friendly eyes. She held out a hand as a sign of friendship. “They recruited me from the circle, to help fight the Blight.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes, the Blight,” Leandra breathed out, apprehensively. “Garrett and Carver left to join the King’s Army, to go fight at Ostagar. They’ve sent letters; there’s been battles with darkspawn and wilder folk. It’s dark times.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Just then, another young woman came in from a back room. She looked much like Marian, only softer, rounder, more feminie, with long wavy hair and a kerchief tied stylishly at her neck. Marian had been all rough leathers and fur and glints of metal studs and buckles.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Who’s this, Mother?” Bethany asked, eyeing her curiously. They were about the same age and had played together as children, but a decade was a long time, and children who went away to Circles were soon forgotten.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Why, don’t you recognize your cousin Solomae?” Leandra exclaimed. Bethany tilted her head to the side and the same look of suspicion that had narrowed Marian’s eyes now darkened hers.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Of course. Why not? Solomae the traitor, Solomae the snitch. Father must have told them what had happened. How she had given them all away to the templars who came looking for them. Elodie, Solomae, Tristan, and Geoffrey. All taken away to Circles, just like Daylen, because of her, because of their neighbor, because of the curse of magic.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She cleared her throat. “Hello, Bethany. How are you?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Good. I am well. Surprised, though. I had thought you were gone, swallowed up by the Circle.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m with the Wardens now,” she said, as she had said twice already, as she felt she must keep on saying for the rest of her life. “We’re on our way to Ostagar to meet up with the King’s army.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I was just telling her that Garrett and Carver are already there,” said Leandra.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes,” said Bethany, with a little smile. She sat down at the table. “The menfolk have gone off to war and left us here alone.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Leandra ignored the jest in Bethany’s tone and said to Solomae, “Marian and Bethany are… special. For once I’m glad of it. I worry about their brothers, facing the darkspawn hordes.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Mages will be needed in the upcoming fight,” Solomae said, parroting what Duncan had said when he invoked the right of conscription. “Now will be the time for us to prove our worth.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Mages are always valued in times of war,” said Marian, suddenly appearing from the shadows. “But only the ones who wear the Chantry’s collar.” She strolled over to the mabari, Bruiser, and scratched him under his studded collar.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae started when she appeared, her skin prickling, and then tried to play it off casually. Marian just laughed, satisfied that she had the upper hand with her antics. But then she turned to her mother and said, “You shouldn’t be chattering to this one. Don’t you remember what her father said happened when the templars came? She spilled everything.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh, Marian,” Leandra sighed. “Hold your tongue.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I can’t stay long, so I’ll be quick to the point,” said Solomae, not liking the frostiness of the welcome she was getting from her cousins. “I wanted to know if you had heard from my father recently? Where is he living now, do you know?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Still in Crestwood,” Leandra said, gently. “As far as I know, he never moved away. The last time we spoke was when my husband, Malcolm, died. I sent word and he came to stand vigil with us.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae nodded. It was Andrastan custom for families to stand vigil over the pyre of the deceased until it was burnt down to ash. She was surprised to learn that her father had never left Crestwood, though, since she imagined it was very hard to get along with the neighbors. They would view him with suspicion after his children turned out to be closeted mages, and he must surely feel some resentment towards the one who had sent for the templars.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“He stayed in one place in case one of you ever came looking for him,” said Bethany, as if reading her mind. “And he had no one to hide from anymore. Nothing more to lose.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae swallowed and looked down. It had been for the best. She still believed that. She tried to believe that, as she looked between Leandra, and Marian, and Bethany. She had admitted to the templars that she and Elodie had magic, but she had never breathed a word about the Hawkes. That had not been her secret to tell. Also, the templars had not asked. No one had ever asked. And so, they were still hidden, ten years later. But they were already in more danger of exposure, now that the Blight was threatening to drive them from their home. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>The upheaval of a Blight promised to be like a hand of fate reaching down and lifting up all the rocks and logs and sending the creatures that hid there scattering; all the blood mages, maleficarum, and innocent apostates alike. If it could not be contained to the Wilds, if it spread beyond the last line of defense at Ostagar, it would rip a hole through Ferelden in more ways than one.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was </span>
  <em>
    <span>her</span>
  </em>
  <span> job to make sure that did not happen, now.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She said none of this, though. She only said, “Thank you. That is good to know. I don’t know if the Wardens will be traveling near Crestwood anytime soon, but perhaps if I leave a letter with you, you could send it to him?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Of course, dear,” said Leandra. “I know he would be overjoyed to hear from you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae wasn’t so sure about that. But apprentices were not allowed to send letters, so she had not written to him for years, and then when she passed her Harrowing and was made a full mage, with expanded freedoms, there had seemed little point. What were the chances he lived in Crestwood, and would he even want to hear from her? Had he forgiven her?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Could I trouble you for some ink and paper?” she asked. She’d had so little hope of success that she had not even prepared a letter beforehand.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Of course, of course. Bethany, run and bring my writing desk,” said Leandra. Then she turned to the cooking pot over the fire and said to Solomae, “You must have some dinner, too. You look so pale.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They all looked pale, Solomae thought. It was, perhaps, an Amell family trait. But she did not turn down the offer of food. It had to be better than the slop Alistair had been feeding them on the road.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Bethany obediently went into the back room again. Marian crossed her arms and leaned against a wall, watching Solomae with no less suspicion and judgement than she had before. Solomae wondered what her apostate cousins must have thought of her all those years, after hearing that she had spilled the family secret to the templars. How much had they despised her memory, to still be so hostile ten years on?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>As if to answer this question, Marian started to absently play with a pair of small daggers, flicking them back and forth in her hands with no seeming purpose but to be unsettling and weird.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Bethany returned with a small portable writing desk which she set on the kitchen table. Solomae thanked her politely and then was faced with the impossible task of putting words to paper.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>In the end, her letter was short and perfunctory. She did not know what to say, and the thought of one of the Hawkes reading it embarrassed her. So she merely told her father the basics, and said that if the Wardens ever camped near Crestwood she would do her best to stop by. She left out everything about the Circle, about Nelmirea and Jowan and Cullen, as if the past decade of her life were not worth commenting on. She did not say that she had been conscripted, nearly tranquilized, accused of blood magic by association. None of that. What point was there? Her father did not need to know any of that, whether it would distress him or whether he might think she deserved it for failing to keep her mouth shut.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Letters were empty things. What she really wanted was to see him again, in person. Only then would she know if she was forgiven. She would never be able to see her mother or siblings again, but perhaps… perhaps… Crestwood was not so far away. And why shouldn’t the Wardens end up there one day?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They had passed by the Bronach bannorn twice already, once immediately after leaving Kinloch Hold when they were traveling north to Highever, and again on their way back south. But they had taken a route that hewed close to the storm coast rather than cutting inward through the forests and grasslands of northern Ferelden, and had been too far away from the village of Crestwood for Solomae to dare slip away from camp. She had thought about it, calculating how many miles lay between her and a possible reunion, but she had been sure her father could not still live in the house along the lakeshore in lower Crestwood, and did not want to risk being chased as a deserter just to go check.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She did not stay long at the Hawke home after finishing the letter, sealing it, and eating dinner with them. She would not have even stayed long enough for the food, but that Leandra insisted and it seemed unconscionably impolite to refuse. She felt uncomfortable the entire time, for though Leandra was welcoming and Bethany was cautiously friendly, Marian never stopped being hostile in a passive-aggressive, sardonic sort of way.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Leandra asked her to stay the night, saying it was far too dangerous to be out on the roads alone after dark. But Solomae could not—would not—stay, she had to be back in her tent before daybreak if she did not want anyone to know she had gone. The Warden camp was not far, not even a full hour’s walk.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She was glad to be alone again. Seeing the Hawkes brought back so many memories she did not like. Memories of years spent in fear of discovery, under the shadow of a family curse that had driven them from Kirkwall. The memory of the last time she had seen her father and siblings—the disappointment in Father’s eyes, the sadness, the desperation when he knew that it was all over. The tears of the younger children because they didn’t understand why they were being taken away. Elodie’s anger, her own shame.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>For a long time, Kinloch Hold had been a refuge. A way out of the nightmare. Better to be found than live as a fugitive. Her success as a mage there had been important to her, in ways that Nelmirea had never understood. She needed to prove that cooperating with the templars had been the right choice, that it was a better life than hiding out in hamlets like Crestwood or Lothering, jumping at every knock on the door.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The Circle was no more, and the Wardens were all she had to stand between her and the specter of apostasy. So she returned to her tent, sneaking effortlessly past Alistair who was dozing while standing guard, and tried to get some sleep before daybreak and on to Ostagar.</span>
</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>
  <span>When they returned to Lothering after the battle was lost and the king slain, Solomae saw her cousins again. They were among the masses of people getting ready to flee Lothering. Garrett and Carver had returned, deserters from the King’s army, with no other thought than to take their mother and sisters and run. There would be no heroic last stand for the Hawkes, at least not on Fereldan soil.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Come with us,” Leandra said. “We are going to take a ship to Kirkwall. We still have family there, my brother Gamlen. I know he would welcome you for Revka’s sake.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I can’t,” said Solomae. “I am with the Wardens now.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She had almost said yes. She had almost asked if Gamlen would take in an elf, as well.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea had been injured at Ostagar, a grievous head wound that had tested the limits of Solomae’s healing abilities. She was resting in camp while Solomae helped the others make preparations to leave. Solomae was out gathering elfroot when she spotted her cousins moving down the lane towards the highway.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She was with Morrigan, the apostate from the Wilds, at the time. Morrigan was not the least bit interested in her private business, and turned her back as Solomae went to flag them down. Morrigan wouldn’t have cared if she had left with the Hawkes right then and there. The hedge witch could be extremely irritating about the Circle, having no regard for the Chantry or its mages, but she could be counted on for indifference. Solomae was grateful for that.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She thought of Duncan killing Ser Jory when he tried to flee. But Duncan was dead, and none of the other surviving Wardens would have stopped her deserting if that’s what she felt she must do. Maybe Alistair would one day grow into the kind of leader who would skewer deserters on the end of a blade, if he survived enough battles to grow old and stern, but he was a far cry from someone to fear now.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And yet she said no to Leandra. She said goodbye to the Hawkes. Why did she say goodbye? </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Because Nelmirea was not there to go with them?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae wondered what the two of them were even doing caught up in all of this. What madness had brought them here? They were not meant to be warriors battling the nightmare horde. They were not warriors at all. She had little prowess with battle magic and Nelmirea… Nelmirea was meant to dance with butterflies in a field of flowers, not fall in the fires of war. How could they hope to survive?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But she said “no” and watched her cousins leave. She doubted that she would ever see them again.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She was with the Wardens now. They were both with the Wardens now. They could not be called apostates so long as they were with the Wardens.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Did you send the letter?” she asked, only when Leandra was too far down the road to hear her.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0012"><h2>12. Bad Blood (Redcliffe)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>“By all that’s holy… you! I can’t believe it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae had not thought to see Jowan’s face again. But there he was, in the dungeons below Redcliffe Castle, looking sad and pathetic in a cell. His face blanched with surprise when he saw that it was her. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Of course it is you,</span>
  </em>
  <span> she thought as she drew nearer, her own surprise fading into a sense of certainty that the Maker had a twisted sense of humor. So this was the dangerous blood mage who had caused all the problems in Redcliffe… still just Jowan the Mediocre and Unambitious, apparently unable to even slip out from behind the bars of a hinterland lord’s prison cell.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There were only three of them in the dungeons below Redcliffe Castle: Solomae, Lythra, and Alistair, plus the dog who followed him around. At first, after Teagan Guerrin had disappeared into the castle, when plans were being made to sneak in through the hidden tunnel, Solomae had not liked the idea of splitting up with Nelmirea. But only a small group was to try infiltrating the castle, hoping to get by unnoticed and open the gates for the rest, and as it was agreed that Solomae was the best at healing spells, she had gone down with Alistair and Lythra to safeguard them. Nelmirea waited, along with the rest of their party and the remaining Redcliffe knights, to be granted entry through the front gates.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Now, standing before Jowan, Solomae was glad that Nelmirea was not there. He would be hers alone to deal with.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>As she surveyed him, cowering in the cell, dirty and thin and downtrodden, she could see him through Nelmirea’s eyes. He had been Nelmirea’s best friend, and Nelmirea was her best friend, so she had always tried to tolerate Jowan. Nelly felt indebted to him because he had been kind to her when she first arrived at the tower, a full two years before Solomae had joined them, and such basic humanity had won a decade of loyalty that he did not deserve.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She spoke to him a little while. Right off the bat, he asked her about Lily, wanting to know if his lover was alright, wanting to know if she had been punished for her actions. It disgusted Solomae that he did not ask what had become of Nelly, who had risked all to aid and abet with no thought to her own self-interest.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Nelmirea is here with me,” she said, “not that you care. The Grey Wardens recruited us both. Not Lily though; she, they sent to Aenor. The Wardens were only interested in saving us because we have skills.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Alistair, who was hanging back with Lythra, letting Solomae talk to the prisoner because she’d recognized him, mumbled something about how the Wardens didn’t recruit as an act of charity and the Joining was dangerous.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Once he had recovered from his distress over Lily, Jowan told her what he thought had happened at Redcliffe. He claimed it was Connor, the Arl’s son, who must have unleashed a demon upon his people. Jowan had been hired by the Arlessa to train the boy so that he could hide and control his magic. Poisoning Eamon had been the only task Loghain asked of him, in exchange for a promise of fixing things with the Circle. There had been no plot to destroy all of Redcliffe… just accidents and incompetence.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae did believe him, in the end, because she had always thought him a small minded, unambitious lout, and inadvertently mucking things up seemed a lot more his style than being an evil mastermind. It seemed he had trained the boy just enough to make him dangerous. So like Jowan to be a terrible teacher and make things worse instead of better.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You have always been mediocre,” she said, disdainfully. “If you weren’t a mage there wouldn’t be anything wrong with that, but magic requires exceptionalism. And you were never cut out to be a mage. But you dragged Nelmirea down with you, you know. She could have been so much more, if it wasn’t for you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He hung his head.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What are you going to do with me?” Jowan asked, looking at the warriors behind her. Alistair with his sword and Lythra nervously holding her bow at the ready, an arrow nocked, her fingers playing at the feathers.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They would kill him, Solomae knew. All she had to do was say the word. She could vouch for him or condemn him and let her companions do the dirty work. Nelmirea was not there to witness it. She could be done with Jowan once and for all. If Nelmirea did find out, she could blame Alistair, say it was his Templar training, his distrust of mages. Nelly might even believe her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We’ll let you go,” she said, the words slow and leaden on her tongue. “But you have to leave. Get out of here and make sure I never see your face again.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jowan sighed, slumping against the bars. “I’m so tired of running and lying,” he said. “I thought Loghain would help me. But now…”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Would you rather we kill you or leave you here to die?” Solomae said, sharply.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He gave her a miserable, limpid look in answer. By the Maker. He really did want to just give up and stop fighting, didn’t he? She shook her head and unlocked the gate with a simple spell that Jowan himself could have performed. “Go,” she said. “Run. I don’t want you going anywhere near Nelmirea though, do you hear me? She’s been through enough on your account already.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’ll go,” he said, slipping out past her, keeping his distance from Lythra and Alistair, eying the mabari warily. “I wish I could help you fight, but I’m no hero, I—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I know that,” Solomae said. She almost added, </span>
  <em>
    <span>I’m no hero either but every day since you ruined my life I wake up and I fight.</span>
  </em>
  <span> But she did not. Jowan had never been her friend. She should never have even gotten involved in his plot to elope with Lily, she knew that. It had been her own inability to let Nelmirea misbehave that had compelled her to meddle. She wouldn’t stand there wasting precious time arguing with Jowan or trying to make him feel more guilty than he already did. They had to save Teagan, and probably, it seemed, confront the abomination that was the boy mage Connor.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Are you sure about letting him go?” Alistair asked, edging closer, holding his sword. “I mean, he’s your friend, you know him better than we do, but he’s still a blood mage…”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I </span>
  <em>
    <span>do</span>
  </em>
  <span> know him better than you,” Solomae said, as Jowan scurred off into the darkness of the tunnel. “Don’t worry. That’s not a big scary maleficar, it’s just a stupid boy in over his head.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Fools with more power than they have the sense or strength to control are scary enough,” said Lythra, lifting her bow and training her arrow at Jowan’s retreating back. For a moment Solomae thought she was going to loose an arrow between his shoulder blades, and she lifted a hand to stop her, to knock her aim askew with a misdirection spell, but Lythra lowered her arms and shook her head, saying, “But I will do what you think is best.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Thank you,” said Solomae, allowing the bit of magic gathered in her hands to dissipate. She didn’t want to carry with her the sight of Jowan tripping and falling, an arrow piercing his heart through his back. If she did she’d be seeing it every time she looked Nelmirea in the eye.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Alistair shrugged and lifted up his shield, and they carried on through the basement, making their way up to the castle courtyard where more undead awaited.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>When they opened the castle gates to let the others in, Nelmirea rushed forward to hug her quickly, a gesture of relief. Solomae did not tell her that they had found Jowan in the dungeon below the castle, thankful she did not have the guilt of his death to weigh on her. She hoped he had escaped out the secret entrance into the windmill and would disappear into the Hinterlands after that, to be hunted by templars or killed by darkspawn, it didn’t matter, because he wasn’t her problem and she would not let him be Nelmirea’s problem anymore.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>That, at least, is what she had hoped.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Once they entered the castle with the full force of all the Wardens and the Knights of Redcliffe, and released Bann Teagan from the mind control Connor had placed him under, Jowan reappeared.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They were debating what must be done about Connor. Isolde, his mother, was crying and begging for mercy even though it seemed clear that the boy was gone, an abomination. Solomae was quiet, though rattled. Isolde was so like her own father and mother… it was like reliving the past; the weeping of her mother, the vain secrecy of her father. These people, these non-magical parents who did not know well enough to send their children to the Circle… this is what they wrought. This is what might have happened to Solomae or one of her siblings, if she had not spoken up, had not given them away to the templars....</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“He doesn’t have to die,” said a voice from the shadows, interrupting an argument between Alistair, Nelmirea, and Morrigan about whether or not Connor was beyond help. Solomae had been lost in her own private thoughts, but she cringed when she heard the familiar voice, and saw Nelmirea’s head whip around in surprise.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Out walked Jowan. “You!” cried Isolde, pointing an accusatory finger. “You did this! Who let this man out of his cell? I thought he was dead by now!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jowan held up his hands. “I only want to help,” he insisted. “To make amends. Please.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea turned towards him, her large grey eyes widening beyond surprise. “Jowan? What are you doing here? What—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“This is the mage who poisoned Eamon?” Teagan asked, taking a defensive stance.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes,” said Isolde. “This is the man who put a demon in my Connor!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I didn’t summon a demon to possess your son!” Jowan denied. “I’m sorry. I know I did the wrong thing in poisoning the Arl, but you have to believe me, I never meant for all this to happen. I want to fix it. I think I know a way to get the demon out of your son.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Isolde, desperate for any option that did not involve Connor’s death, was willing to listen. He explained his idea to send a mage into the Fade to confront the demon and kill it, freeing Connor of its control. Nelmirea also listened, her eyes darting to Solomae periodically. Jowan’s plan sounded insane, using blood magic to fix a problem, as if blood magic could ever be used for good rather than evil. She did not see how trading an innocent person’s life for Connor was at all defensible. He would be forever an abomination. There could be no saving him, and the idea that he could be brought back from demonic possession went against everything she had ever been taught to believe. That fact that Jowan, of all people, had the hubris to think he could do such a thing, rankled her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She said as much, challenging him in front of the nobles, whose eyes darted back and forth between the two former circle mages as if trying to reconcile their hope with the awful truth they must surely recognize. But in the end, Jowan was more persuasive.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I will do it,” Isolde said, her voice resolute, her eyes seeming unafraid for the first time since Solomae had met her. “I will be the sacrifice. Anything to save my son.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’ll need someone to go into the Fade when I cast the spell,” said Jowan. He looked nervously at Nelmirea.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Morrigan, though no one had asked her, said, “Twill not be me, I can assure you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Wait,” said Solomae, still trying to stop them from engaging in this foolishness, “do you really need to use blood magic? What you are suggesting is like a Harrowing, isn’t it? There are four of us here, if Morrigan will deign to help. Three mages to channel the spell and send you into the Fade. Isn’t that enough?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jowan shook his head. “It would take half a dozen seasoned enchanters, at least, and copious amounts of lyrium, to muster that kind of power without blood magic.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We could go to the Tower,” Solomae suggested. “There are mages there and they would have enough lyrium… And we need to visit them with the Treaties, anyway, don’t we?” She looked to Alistair.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He nodded slowly. “We do,” he said. “If we could get help… and avoid any more death, that really would be the best option.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No,” said Isolde, her distress mounting, “that will take too long. Even if you take a boat across the lake, and even if they agree to help us, who knows what will happen to my Connor, or what he might do, while we wait. We have to do it now. I am not afraid!” Her voice trembled as she spoke.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I cannot condone using blood magic,” Solomae said, and Alistair nodded in agreement.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You don’t have to condone it,” said Nelmirea softly.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No,” Solomae said sharply, her raised voice a stark contrast to Nelly’s quietly resolved tone. But she couldn’t help it. She recognized the look in her friend’s eyes. Nelmirea was going to let Jowan rope her into doing something stupid and self-destructive, yet again.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae could see Morrigan rolling her eyes and shot her a glare. The apostate had been getting along well with Nelmirea as they traveled west from Lothering, even attempting to teach her shapeshifting spells, but Solomae didn’t care for her disdain for the Circle. Nelmirea ate it up, of course, telling Morrigan all the scary evil templar stories she could think of, while Morrigan scoffed and said she could make any templar beg for mercy on his knees and didn’t fear even a whole tower full of them. Funny how she was so fearless but was the first to say “not I” when the prospect of entering the Fade to battle a demon came up…</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Will you give us a moment?” Nelmirea asked, directing her question to Lady Isolde and Bann Teagan. They nodded, and she took Solomae by the arm, walking a little ways away. Once they were out of earshot Nelmirea hissed, “You are not in charge, here, Solomae. Let me do this.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae shook her arm free and said, “I cannot believe this. Helping Jowan when you did not know about him was one thing, but now you see how far his madness is taking him. Blood magic? Entering the fade to battle a demon? And for what? You are just trading one life for another, and killing the wrong person.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea narrowed her eyes. “Isolde is sacrificing herself to save her son, just as we are expected to sacrifice ourselves to save Fereldan from the Blight. I would rather let her do this, willingly, her eyes open, than to kill a young boy whose only crime is being born a mage.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“His only crime?” Solomae hissed. “He invited a demon in. He’s no longer even a boy, he’s an abomination. What will you do when Isolde has been sacrificed and you find that the demon is too—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Enough! Stop thinking like a Circle Mage,” Nelmirea seized both her arms and shook her. “Stop talking like a Templar. Jowan thinks the boy can be saved and you saw yourself that he’s not fully gone, not the twisted inhuman monster they taught us to expect. He’s still just a boy.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“A boy who summoned a demon.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m going to help Jowan do this,” Nelmirea said, resolutely ignoring her argument. She let go of Solomae’s arms and drew herself up to her full height. “We’re Grey Wardens now. That means thinking for ourselves. That means not shrinking away from a plan just because it means getting our hands dirty. I think there’s a chance this could work. I want to try.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae turned on her heel and stalked back out to rejoin the others. She felt a hot anger at Nelmirea and Jowan both welling up inside her, but it was Alistair she approached. “Are you going to just stand by and let this happen?” she asked him. “This goes against all your templar training. You should put a stop to this.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He looked at her, taken aback, startled by her demanding tone. Nelmirea was trailing behind her and he looked to her helplessly for a moment, before replying, “It’s not up to me.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“But—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You heard Teagan and Isolde. They are willing to let Jowan try this. If Nelmirea wants to go into the Fade that’s her choice.” He said this with more confidence, nodding to Bann Teagan and Isolde.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Her choice? You’re supposed to be our leader,” Solomae argued. “Tell Nelmirea she can’t do this.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea walked past her, bumping up against her arm hard enough to jostle her to the side. “If we do not attempt to save Connor, Alistair may need to kill him, using his templar tricks. So I doubt he’ll be eager to stop us from preventing that situation.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Alistair took a step backwards and lifted his hands. “Help the boy if you can. I’m not going to get in the middle of this.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“And what happens if Nelly comes back from the Fade possessed?” Solomae objected, scrabbling for anything to discourage them from going through with this. She could feel it all slipping out of her grasp and knew she sounded desperate. She looked back at the other Wardens and soldiers of Redcliffe, who were scattered around the hall licking their wounds after the battle against Connor and the guards under his control. No one would meet her gaze.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You have so little faith in me. I’ve passed my Harrowing and you think I can do nothing against a demon, still? I’m just a stupid dirty city elf who doesn’t know what’s best, aren’t I?” Nelmirea said, and the vitriol in her words shocked Solomae.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No,” she said, “that’s not fair. You’re putting words in my mouth.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Then step aside and let me do this,” Nelmirea said, lowering her voice. “You can stay and watch or you can leave, but you don’t get to stop me.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae stood with her fists clenched, shaking her head wordlessly. She looked around and saw that the others were eying her warily now, as if weighing whether they would have to restrain her or drag her away before Jowan and Nelmirea were allowed to perform their dark blood magic ritual.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Leliana, the Chantry sister from Lothering, crept up and put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I do not like this either,” she said in her lilting Orlesian accent, “but it’s not up to us. Let them do what they must.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Her shoulders slumped as she realized that everyone was against her. Even those who should be firmly on her side, the templar and the laysister. It was like a bad dream where everyone was stupid and helpless against the insidious seductive power of blood magic. She shook Leliana’s hand free and walked away, putting as much distance between her and Nelmirea and Jowan as she could without leaving the hall. She told herself she was most disappointed in Alistair, for what was the use of a former templar in the Warden ranks if he would not stand up against reckless and evil magic. But she knew that nothing he did or thought or said could bother her as much as Nelmirea’s foolishness.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The Redcliffe soldiers eyed her warily, as if calculating whether or not they would have to stop her from fighting back. As if they thought she might run upstairs to kill Connor where he had fled to his room, knowing they would have to honor Lady Isolde and Bann Teagan’s wishes and stop her if she were mad and reckless enough to try it. She hated herself in that moment for being too cowardly to do it, too timid to even try to slip away while the others were preoccupied. If she could she would end this madness. But that was not her. She did not think she could do it all on her own. She did not have Nelmirea’s hubris.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She watched as Jowan made his preparations for the rite, as he drew a circle on the floor and lit candles around it. Did he have any idea, truly, what he was doing? He still looked to her like a boy playing at being a blood mage.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She watched numbly as Lady Isolde took her place within the circle, Nelmirea and Jowan flanking her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was all so simple and quick. Jowan waved his arms and Isolde’s body was lifted up into the air, her head thrown back as she levitated. Blood began to seep from her eyes, nose, mouth and ears. Then she jerked with a sudden scream, her body convulsing and folding backwards unnaturally, her spine snapping and a gush of blood erupting from her chest as if Jowan had driven an invisible sword through her. She hung there in the air, skewered on nothing, like the gruesome etchings of people impaled on spikes as depicted in history books Solomae had read within the safety of the circle library. Then Isolde’s limp body plummeted to the floor, her blood still hanging midair, hovering there as Jowan drew upon it. His eyes were rolled back in his head as lines of red magical energy ran like cracks along his skin. He kept waving his arms, drawing in the blood and the magic, until he held it all within him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nelmirea had been standing and watching the whole thing in transfixed horror, but now as Joawn turned his attention to her, her head jerked back and her eyes turned white. Her arms lifted like a marionette and then she too collapsed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Solomae barely had a moment to think what she was doing before she was by Nelmirea’s side. She shadow stepped from all the way across the hall to the edge of the summoning circle in an instant. She caught Nelmirea as she felt, her hands braced under those slight elven shoulders right before Nelly could crack her head open on the floor. Her knees were bruised from diving onto the flagstones and she shook from the effort of transporting herself across the room.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“How long will it take?” she asked, not taking her eyes from Nelmirea’s face. Nelly’s eyes were still open but unseeing; at least, not seeing anything this side of the Veil. Her hands and lips twitched as if dreaming, but her eyes were fully rolled back into her head, showing only the whites and the red veins, her lids quivering without blinking. Solomae dared not look at the dead body of Isolde lying in the circle, her blood pooling around her, inching towards them.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jowan took a moment to answer. He was now slumped over and breathing hard from the effects of the spell. She could sense his fatigue without looking at him. It was part of the healing specialization she had trained in at the Circle. She could sense when someone nearby was drained of mana and suffering from wounds or exhaustion. She had no desire to help Jowan out, however.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s in Nelmirea’s hands now,” he said. “She has to find the demon and confront it. How long it takes is up to her.”</span>
</p>
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